The Operator
by Donnistar
Summary: It's been five years since Dib revealed the Irken invasion to the world. When his paranormal investigation firm recieves a case about a violent monster known as the "Slenderman," Dib can't help but get a creeping sense of deja vu. Now his safety and sanity are on the line as he tries to solve this case before his past - literally - hunts him down.  :Finished:
1. Zita's Question

_A few months ago I noticed that the viral cryptid known as the "Slenderman" bears a pretty shocking resemblance to our favorite Irken Elite with his Pak legs extended - multiple long, spindly legs, small body, simple face, and an incredible knack for destruction. Zim would probably be more than happy to borrow some pages out of Slendy's book. And thus was born the idea for this story._

_If you haven't heard of Slenderman, don't worry. I wrote this with the intent that it would stand on its own in the IZ fan community. Just consider it an outside reference, of sorts. However, there are going to be a TON of references to the "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom" episode of Invader Zim (it IS my favorite, after all) so if you haven't seen that one in a while, maybe have the script open in another tab or something._

_Rating is for (eventual) profanity and violence. Nothing sexually explicit, but expect a few curses (mostly on Gaz's part) and bloodshed about on the level of an edgy CSI episode. I anticipate this being pretty dark, folks._

_Oh, and I don't have a beta reader right now because the beta reader-application-process-whatever terrifies me. So if you take a look at this and say to yourself, "geez, I could really kick the crap out of this story," then by all means PM me. I am more than happy to have any unbiased source kick the crap out of it before I foist it on an unsuspecting public, if that's something you'd be willing to do._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 1: Zita's Question<strong>

Hi Skool was a hideous montage of awkwardness. Any number of T.V. specials and inspirational emails had assured Dib that every gawky, pimpled teenager was just as off-balance during these years as he was. As he stalked through the hallways on his way to lunch, watching the other students flirting and gossiping and joking with one another, this claim seemed pretty dubious. Everyone else seemed to _act_ much more self-assured than he _felt_. He hoped that all those chipper, reassuring adults would at least grant him that.

He hitched his messenger bag a little further up on one shoulder, sidling sideways through a particularly stubborn group of girls. His height made it a little easier to find a path through the other students; Dib had broken six feet at his last physical and was well on his way to cutting the same imposing figure as his father. If he could learn to stop slouching, that is.

Stopping at his locker, Dib took a minute to shuffle around the books in his inventory. History and English were in the afternoon, so he grabbed a copy of Frankenstein and thudded his biology textbook onto the bottom shelf. Other teenagers parted around him like a wave as they walked, with such regularity that he was badly startled when he shut his locker door and saw a girl standing behind it.

"Crap!" Dib squeaked. His voice hadn't sounded half-broken like that for a few years, and he ran a hand nervously through his hair to calm himself down. The girl stared at him until he got over his fit.

"You're Dib, right?" and she lowered her voice conspiratorially. "You discovered that alien a few years ago?"

Staring in disbelief at this lavender-headed girl who knew his name, Dib spoke with hesitation. "...yeah. That was me."

_Zita! That's her name! We went to Middle Skool together!,_ he realized suddenly. She looked much different with her hair long instead of spiked crazily over her head.

"And you know a lot about the paranormal?" Zita asked, still speaking so quietly that only he could hear her. She was still difficult to make out, what with all the screaming the students in the hallway were doing.

"You could say that. I mean, it is my _job_." He stopped and zipped his messenger bag shut, watching her warily. Sure, Dib got along with Keef and Melvin and a few of the other kids most of the time, but he couldn't remember the last time a random student had spoken to him without reason. He had gone from being systematically mocked to mostly ignored, like a distasteful piece of furniture. "Oh, don't mind the Dib in the corner. Belonged to a previous owner, you see. We're having it sent away as soon as possible." They acknowledged him when they had to, usually polite but rarely kindly or with interest. Nothing more, nothing less.

Zita was starting to seem frustrated at his refusal to talk. "Well...what do you know about ghosts? Like, how can you tell the difference between things a ghost does and just...weird stuff happening?"

"That would depend on the type of ghost, mostly. A residual ghost would just make noises, lights, that kind of thing. An intelligent ghost could probably move objects or try and communicate. Why?" Despite his defensive instincts, despite his desire to avoid putting himself in a situation to be made fun of, Dib's curiosity had been piqued. It was hard for him to walk away from a question about the paranormal. Especially one that seemed serious.

"Hehe - it's actually sort of a funny story." She gave a silly giggle and Dib resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Torque and I were...hanging out at the abandoned asylum across town. He likes to go there because it's technically trespassing and he's such a daredevil. You know the one, I think - the Crazy House?"

"Oh, you mean the Crazy House for Boys? Yeah, I think I've got some _clue_ what you're talking about." Dib said, feeling vaguely ill at having the place brought up. His mind quickly shuttled this out of the way with a spike of anger - it had been Zita herself who'd sentenced him to a narrowly-escaped life locked in a padded cell, all those years ago in middle skool when his ravings had annoyed her.

Dib slammed his locker door shut with a jarring _clang,_ feeling no remorse as Zita flinched at the sound. "You've got a lot of nerve, you know? I've been quiet since seventh grade; I haven't bothered anybody, so I don't know where you get off by bringing that godforsaken place up. If you wanted to call me crazy you could have just done it to my face instead of making up some stupid ghost story."

She stared up at him for a moment in wide-eyed confusion, probably deliberating whether to laugh at him or run away. Then a light of recognition glimmered somewhere amidst all the eye shadow and she whispered "oh" very softly. Dib wasn't surprised when it took her a bit to recall the incident - what had been a nearly life-ruining day of terror for him was, of course, a footnote in the Perfectly Normal Life of Zita.

"C'mon Dib, you can't _really_ still be mad about that whole Crazy Card thing? We were just _kids_ then. I'm being serious. You don't think I'd risk talking to someone as uncool as you if I didn't have a real question, do you?" she said, with a frustrated breathiness as though he was being unreasonable.

_Classy. Maybe if you wait around long enough she'll insult your sister, too._

Dib grimaced a little and turned away from her, unwilling to argue or tolerate Zita's mockery any further. He made it about two feet down the hall before he felt her hand on his arm, tugging him roughly backwards. He froze almost mid-step despite his distaste for her; a girl touching his arm was no common occurrence.

"Okay, I'm sorry. That was lame. Just listen to this, okay?" Her voice was a little softer now, less demanding.

Dib recognized some familiarity in her plea to be acknowledged. He'd heard the same tone in his own voice, whenever one of his discoveries went ignored by his peers.

"Make it quick." he said shortly. "The line at lunch is going to be a bitch."

Zita tossed her hair dramatically before beginning her story. "So _like I said,_ Torque and I were hanging out at what's left of the Crazy House, and we kept hearing these weird noises. Up on the higher floors, you know? I thought it sounded like screaming, but Torque said it was more like metal - he said it reminded him of the way monster trucks sound when they scrape against each other."

"Did you notice anything else weird while you were there? Stuff that looked like it had been moved recently, footprints that weren't yours, that kind of thing?" Dib asked, settling more comfortably into his role as an investigator. Thinking about this conversation as an interview and not an awkward rehashing of childhood traumas seemed to at least calm his nerves a bit.

"I don't think - I mean, I wasn't looking at the scenery a whole lot, you know? Hehe. Oh! But I do remember that when I went to get up off the ground, I saw a lot of little markings on the floor. Like, you know when you move a piece of furniture off the carpet, and it'll leave round, flat spots behind? I remember seeing those _everywhere_ once I started noticing them." Zita waved her hands distractingly as she spoke, revealing flashes of gaudy violet nail polish.

"That's...kind of unusual, I guess. Marks on the floor probably wouldn't last since the place was shut down. And screaming in an abandoned building is always suspicious. Especially one with a lot of negative energy." Dib said, with deliberate evenness.

Tapping her foot in obvious impatience against the ground, Zita crossed her arms across her chest and glared up at him. "So what do you think? Does that sound like a ghost?"

"I don't know. It sounds like there's a good chance of paranormal activity, but I'd have to check the place out myself. Gather some empirical evidence, do some research on the history. See how many kids _died_ there, you know the drill."

If Zita noticed or cared about his bitter emphasis, she gave no indication, and Dib realized it was pointless to try and make her feel badly about the six-year-old damage she'd done him. Her brain probably didn't even have a "guilt" setting. Dib had to admit that he envied her that.

"Well, in that case, you're welcome. It's probably not every day that you get a new case handed to you. But if finding a ghost in the Crazy House makes you famous like finding that alien did, you better give Torque and I some credit. _We_ knew about it first, after all. Anyway, I have to go to lunch. My friends are probably wondering what I'm doing."

With that Zita pivoted neatly on one high-heeled foot, leaving him gawking angrily at the spot where she'd been standing before she disappeared into the throng of rushing students. Dib gave a rattling sigh of frustration, only half believing that the whole exchange had even taken place - he wondered vaguely if Zita made a habit of talking down to "uncool" students like himself, just to remind him of their place on the social ladder.

This made Dib feel a little better about technically lying to her by pretending that he had any intention of carrying out an investigation in the Crazy House. There wasn't a force in heaven or hell that could drag Dib back to that place. If Zita wanted to get famous by discovering a ghost there, she and Torque would have to do it on their own time. Maybe they'd get eaten halfway through like in some straight-to-video horror movie.

Dib started making his way toward the cafeteria, shoving moodily past any of the many students that were shorter than him. Without really thinking, Dib's right ring finger found its way to his mouth and he gnawed nervously at what was left of the nail as he walked. The metallic taste of blood did little to discourage him; there was a thin layer of caked crimson embedded in each of his cuticles from his near-constant nail-biting.

Aggravated though he was by Zita's harassment, standing in the lunch line and chewing the tips of his fingers calmed Dib down considerably. Other students pushed by him with deliberate indifference, only casting him the occasional weird look. Right. He'd forgotten that waiting in line alone with your fingers in your mouth tended to freak people out. He wiped his hands on his pants and jammed them into the pockets of his jeans instead, hoping to avoid any more distasteful glares.

Dib wasn't even sure what lunch was today. He took his serving of horribleness from one of the cafeteria drones, feeling whatever-it-was squirm slightly on his tray as he turned to the lunchroom. A battlefield of tables and screaming students stretched before him. For a second or two Dib glanced around, looking for a flash of violet hair - Gaz rarely let him sit with her anymore, now that she had her own sorry excuses for friends. But he still liked to know where she was, at least.

"Move it, Membrane! Some of us already have a place to sit, you know!" Torque rammed the edge of his own tray roughly into Dib's back from behind him in the line, inching him forward.

"Sorry. I'm going."

Keef and Melvin usually had room at their table. If he got there late they would even pull a chair up to the short end for him, a kindness that he still found surprising. Dib clattered his tray down between the two other boys, trying to catch up in the conversation.

"You can't still be arguing this," Keef was saying in exasperation. "Leia never had a thing for Luke. Period. She just screwed with his head to get back at Han Solo."

Melvin slammed his fork down on the table, nearly spearing the sleeve of Dib's jacket. "Yeah, and Han _believed_ it! There had to have been chemistry there _somewhere_. And you have to give me that Luke wanted to get with Leia, no holds barred."

"Yeah, as part of his princess-saving fetish, maybe. What do you think, Dib?" Keef asked him, looking on with reddish eyes.

"I dunno. I never really paid much attention to the Leia-Luke dynamic. She ends up with Han in the end, so what difference does it make?" He took a sip of chocolate milk and rolled his eyes as Melvin and Keef each groaned at him in turn.

"It makes all the difference!" shrieked Melvin. "We're just gonna have to watch them again and go over this point-by-point. Either of you guys free tonight?"

"Oh, wait. Let me just check my calendar." Keef pantomimed opening a book and scrutinized its imaginary pages. "Well, if I move back that supermodel party and don't bang Catherine Zeta-Jones until tomorrow, I should be able to fit it in."

Dib snorted in appreciation. "Geez, Keef. Don't you think she's a little old for you?"

"Good question. I was definitely old enough for your mom last night, though. _Burn_!" Keef held up one hand for a high-five, and then wilted visibly when no one took him up on the offer.

"What about you, Dib? Can you make it over to my place tonight? I bet my mom would even let us get Chinese!" Melvin asked, pointedly ignoring Keef's antics.

For a very uncomfortable thirty seconds or so, Dib chewed reflectively on his bite of food while he thought. These kinds of invitations were rare for him. There seemed to be some kind of social barrier between talking to people at lunch and hanging out with them outside of school that he was never quite able to cross.

Then again, Dib had never been one to choose social standing over duty.

"I'd really like to." he said, choking down the last bit of hopefully-meat. "But I've got work at the Paranormal Investigation firm. Today's really important, too - Agent Bill is giving me my first solo case."

"You have work on a _Friday_? At your ghost-hunting job?" Melvin asked, eyebrow raised and voice sharp in some combination of surprise and suspicion.

"Sure. That way I'm not hunting down vampires on a school night. I'm sorry, guys. I'll have to watch Star Wars with you some other time." Dib tried his best to sound apologetic, but he still wasn't sure that Keef or Melvin thought much of his excuse. He slumped down a little in his chair, picking idly at the lunch that he would rather paint himself with than eat.

"That's okay, Dib. At least you have an after-school job that you like. My mom's been trying to get me to apply to MacMeaties for months." Keef said cheerfully, undeterred by any awkwardness that had fallen over the conversation.

Before long they began discussing the finer points of Ewok evolution, with Dib's ungraceful rejection soon forgotten. Although Did had his own opinions on how natural selection might work in an extraterrestrial environment, he found it difficult to get into the debate. Zita's condescension and the fact that his job dominated over his already meager social life sucked the urge to talk right out of him.

Dib tried to kick the sudden somber mood out of his mind. What difference did a few hi skool interactions matter in the greater scheme of things? After all, in a few hours he'd be free of skool, free of the doubting Melvins and mocking Zitas of the world, and doing exactly what he'd been meant to do from the very start: investigating the paranormal. The day could only improve.

* * *

><p><em>So believe it or not, I've actually gotten the majority of this story already written out. The only delays in updates are as I revise, so expect Chapter 2 later in the week. Otherwise, any review, even if it's just "OMG this was terrible" is more than welcomed. Just so I know that the thing's uploaded and out there.<em>


	2. The Case

_Wow, I literally cannot believe that I already have something like 60 visitors and 2 reviews on this one lame-ass chapter…You all reading this are AMAZING. Zim'sMostLoyalServant had asked for some backstory on Dib's revealing of Zim, which I absolutely promise is going to be touched on at a later point. _

_Until then, I present you with:_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 2: The Case<strong>

There was a serenity Dib felt at his internship. One he couldn't find at home or at Hi Skool, one that eluded him when it was time to sleep. Maybe it was the silence and isolation of his tiny office, tucked at the end of the hallway where he was rarely bothered. Dib had never worked well in the presence of others.

The room was so narrow that he had to turn himself lengthwise, feet against the door, to stretch his legs out. That way the fading light from his porthole-sized window could shine over his shoulder and illuminate the pile of manila folders in his lap.

He rested one elbow on his thigh, chewing absently on the nail of his index finger as he read. Each file held a new case that was coming through the paranormal investigation firm, but they weren't all equally relevant. Dib had figured out rather quickly that a photograph of the supposed "Cheeby Monster" was just a close-up of a drowning caterpillar, so he threw that folder onto his desk.

The one below wasn't much better. Apparently a woman had called in claiming her child was displaying signs of demon possession. Last time Dib checked, a "nose leaking clear, sticky fluid" and a "rasping cough from the bowels of hell itself" were symptoms of a cold. Although he figured that retroviruses and Satan's minions might work together on occasion.

Dib made it all the way to "singing cat with potentially alien origin" before giving up. He took his glasses off in resignation, setting them down on the desk on top of the rejected folders and rubbing at his temple. It was joke cases like these that kept people from taking paranormal investigation seriously. A few lunatics ruining years of diligent work. Making the whole profession look bad.

With a warning click the door to Dib's office came swinging open. He was fast enough to get his boots out of the way but not so fast at recognizing the intruder without his glasses.

"Agent Bill! I haven't quite picked out which case I want to work on yet, but I should have it figured out in -"

"You got it all wrong, kid. I'm Rob from marketing. Sandusky said there was a mop in here."

"Oh." Dib's shoulders fell. "There behind the door. Here's the Lysol." He fumbled around for the bottle beneath his desk and held it out blindly toward the door.

"Thanks, kid. Word to the wise: stay out of the first floor bathroom for a couple days." Rob said sagely.

"Got it."

The door shut again. Dib sighed deeply. He wasn't as prone to delusions of grandeur now as he had been as a kid, but at least with the door shut he could _pretend_ that his internship wasn't taking place in a broom closet above a sketchy Payday Loan company. It could be worse, he figured - at least he wasn't allergic to his job like Brian, who came to school every day covered in hives from having to work with cats and dogs at his veterinary internship. Dib was finally doing work that meant something to him. He finally had a job where paranoia and open-mindedness and curiosity made him invaluable rather than freakish.

Sure, it wasn't perfect. Bill paid him so little that he had to walk to the office instead of drive - the job cost him otherwise. There was always the fact that his father made it clear on no uncertain terms that Dib was bringing shame and embarrassment down on the Membrane family by studying pseudo-science. In a way, though, that embarrassment made it easier. Anymore he felt weirdly satisfied by his father's disapproval. It meant they were different from one another.

_Focus, Dib. Pick a case. This is your first solo investigation, so it better be good._

He reached over to his desk, slamming a palm down ineffectually a few times as he tried to find his glasses. Late afternoon light from the window fell helpfully across the scattered folders. There was a flicker in the monotony of color - a darkness fell across his hand. A tapping sounded behind him.

Dib snapped his glasses onto his face and twisted painfully in his chair, staring out the window. For a moment or two he held perfectly still. Eyes wide and searching, ears trying to hear beyond the sound of the heating and his own thumping heart. Patience and alertness were the keys to successful paranormal investigating, he was learning.

Much to his dismay (or relief? he wasn't sure) the tree outside leaned a branch toward the window as the wind outside picked up again. The leaves blocked some light and scraped against the glass, a perfect imitation of the tapping he'd heard. Dib chided himself silently for being so jumpy as he gathered the folders back together and opened one in the middle. What next, was he going to wet himself trying to take pictures of the Cheeby Monster?

Dib never saw the Cheeby Monster, but he did nearly wet himself at the sight of the picture that fell out of a file labeled "the Slenderman. Class: Euclid."

The Polaroid felt slick and heavy in his suddenly sweaty hand. He tried to focus his attention on the center, where a small boy with a Rubik's Cube was grinning into the camera. A shadowy, twisted shape occupied the corner of the photo, where it almost hid behind a tree. Long stalks or limbs or tentacles jutted from a thin body. The head was square and shaded in darkness.

Dib tried and failed several times to set the picture down. His gaze snapped back to the looming figure again and again. The boy in the photo must not have known the horror that lurked behind him - but it crowded every other thought from Dib's mind.

He hadn't thought about the alien for months. Not in any serious capacity, or for more than a millisecond before his brain ushered the incident from his thoughts like an unruly bar patron. He tried not to think about Zim, for the most part. But the resemblance was too close for Dib's pattern-finding mind to ignore. Sure, it didn't look much like Zim when he had been wandering around the skoolyard. But whenever they'd fought, in the alleyways or beneath Zim's base, the spindly legs had erupted from the alien's Pak and he'd become a new and horrifying force to reckon with.

But it couldn't be. There was no way. A hollow choking began somewhere in Dib's chest as fear forced the air from his lungs, and he did his best to stifle it. The picture quivered in his hand.

_Zim's gone, you idiot. Calm down. You don't sit around worrying about Jeffery Dahmer, do you?_

This was just coincidence. Some kind of paranormal convergent evolution. The Yeti and Bigfoot looked similar, didn't they? It seemed plausible that there could be another monster with such a chilling resemblance to Dib's greatest (_neutralized_! he reminded himself) adversary.

Dib carefully slid the photograph into the back of the papers in the Slenderman file. He found he had to tuck even the white edges out of sight to keep from staring at it. The case itself was mercifully detailed and distracting.

A woman with the last name of "Finch" reported that her son Joby (Dib raised an eyebrow at the name) had gone missing. Initially she assumed the standard worst-case-scenarios - he'd gotten lost in the woods near their home, or a predator had abducted him, or he'd been sent to Underground Skool. The criminal investigation had asked for a picture of the boy, the most recent one of which was currently paper-clipped to the back of the packet in Dib's hands.

The mother had noticed the strange apparition in the photograph. That was pretty impressive on its own, in Dib's opinion. Most people were perfectly happy to see only what they wanted to see, even where real life-and-death situations were concerned. The report said that Joby had been talking about a strange animal that lived in the woods for the few weeks leading up to his disappearance. A tall creature with long limbs and a strange face. It was only when she realized that the same creature was showing up in photographs that she'd contacted a paranormal investigation firm.

The case sounded risky. Challenging. Finding missing kids was a slim-to-none chance. It could just as easily be a bereaved mother unwilling to accept reality and eager to blame a runaway on the paranormal. But for that _picture_. Dib pulled it out again, careful not to scrape the glossy coating on the paper clip. He shook off the shuddering chill that rose gooseflesh on his scalp, trying to look for signs of forgery. Polaroids were hard to fake.

No, this was the real deal. The resolution of the horrid figure and the rest of the shot matched too perfectly. The colors were too in sync. And besides, what kind of sick mother would Photoshop a spidery nightmare into a photo of her potentially dead son?

Dib knew he would never sleep again if he didn't look into this case. The idea had been planted. The sense of closure that he'd so carefully sewn into this consciousness had come ripping open like a bad set of stitches, bleeding doubt into his brain. He had to know. He had to be sure that this was something different.

With the slam of a boot heel against the floor, Dib stood up. He tucked the manila folder securely under one arm and had to press his back up against the wall to get the door open wide enough to slip into the hallway, but managed it after a bit of maneuvering. There were advantages to going through puberty with only height and little weight to show for it. Hell, he'd still wear his line-face shirt if it came down lower than his ribcage anymore.

Agent Bill's office was two doors down from his, between a clown-registration service and a guy who arranged organ donations. The door read "Bill Sandusky and Co., Paranormal Investigations" in professional gold print. Dib wondered vaguely if it would say "Sandusky and Membrane" after he graduated.

Dib knocked once on the door, waited thirty seconds, and then opened it.

"Sir, I've picked out my case. I'd like to look into the alie- the Slenderman." He said.

Dib's superior was hunched intently over his desk, papers scattered around him like a chicken's nest, studying a plaster cast of a footprint. He thrashed about wildly at Dib's intrusion. It took a moment or two before the agent had calmed down enough to answer him.

"Whoo. Okay. Caught me a little short there, buddy. You said you wanted the what case now?"

Dib squared his shoulders, bracing his boots resolutely against the floor in an attempt to seem more self-assured. "I want to take the Euclid case. You know, the woman whose son was taken by a skinny forest monster."

"Oh, _that_ case. I think I remember now." Bill held out one hand for the folder. "Huh. I would have thought the alien-cat would have been more your speed. Trying to branch out a little, are we?" he hitched up the corner of his mouth in a knowing grin.

"Yeah, sure. So when can I start?"

"Hold up there, little man." The agent waved the footprint cast sternly at him. "Picking out a solo case is nothing to be taken lightly. Bungling this could put a damper on your whole career, and this one is pretty involved for someone your age. Are you sure you don't want to try something a little more friendly? How about that Cheeby Monster photo? It looked pretty legitimate."

"No. I want _this_ case." Dib said firmly. "I've been investigating the paranormal since I was a little kid; I know that I can handle it. So when can I start?"

"Alright, alright. Calm down. You can start tomorrow if you want, kid. All the information's right here." Flicking the side of the file emphatically, he handed it back to Dib.

* * *

><p><em>Eh, I felt that this chapter was pretty simple and short and exposition-y, even when I was writing it. So if you're getting the same vibe, Chapter 3 is where things start to really pick up and I'm going to try and have it posted before the weekend is out. Otherwise, thanks for lending me your eyes…in a non-serial killer kind of way. <em>


	3. The Shadow

_I've been getting a lot of really awesome critiques for this story, so I'm trying to take some of your suggestions into account when I go about my revisions. All of your kind reviews and subscriptions have really kicked my perfectionism into high gear, which is great! (Though maybe not obvious, haha). This chapter proved particularly difficult because action and description have never really been my fortes, but I think I've gotten it worked out into something serviceable._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 3: The Shadow<strong>

A couple hours of paperwork later, Bill finally locked up the offices and let Dib go home. They'd stayed later than usual – there were quite a few waivers and organ-donation forms Dib needed to sign before he could pursue a case on his own – and sundown was fast approaching when Dib stepped out of the office park onto the sidewalk to head home.

Walking across the parking lot, steps echoing against the asphalt, Dib rammed his fists into the pockets of his coat. The temperature was on its downward descent for the day, sun hanging heavily near the horizon. Or as much as he could make out through the stick-like winter trees as he trotted down the sidewalk.

It might have been a decent walk home if not for the wind, which fluttered his trench coat and jostled his messenger bag at turns. He kept his shoulders hunched as he went so that his collar offered a bit of protection, but the prickled air still bit at his face.

Of all the objects on his person - the cell phone nestled in his back pocket, the X-ray goggles at the bottom of his satchel, the digital watch that continually caught on things - Dib's thoughts returned over and over to the folder in his shoulder bag. Having it so close to him brought a vague sense of illness roiling to the surface. It was as if one of Zim's antennas was rattling around in his empty pocket.

_It's not Zim!_

Dib kicked a stone further down the sidewalk emphatically, trying to focus on the clattering rock rather than his own paranoia. He didn't understand why this idea was so hard to talk down. Hell, he didn't understand why he _had_ to talk himself down. This should be the greatest day of his life.

Following a paranormal investigation on his own from start to finish? Being solely responsible for every discovery, every twist, every piece of evidence? And finally having the experience and resources and knowledge to do all of it? Sure, he'd followed cases before as a kid, but never in so official a capacity. Never one handed over to him by a professional investigator. The eleven-year-old inside of him squeaked in excitement. The seventeen-year-old outside of him smiled crookedly into the slicing winter wind.

By this time tomorrow he would have forgotten all about the resemblance between his new case and his old enemy. He'd be knee-deep in leads, ready to close in on some fascinating new child-hunting monster. Maybe they'd name it the Dib-beast or something. The Membrane Monster.

_Don't get too keen on that idea. Remember how it went last time?_

"Shut up." He spoke out loud this time. On the abandoned, tree-lined road. To himself. The skoolyard cries of "Crazy Dib" had slowed to a stop not a year ago. This was exactly the sort of bullshit that would start it up again.

Dib felt himself go red with embarrassment even though there was no one to watch his outburst. Brushing past the moment, Dib stomped down the street a little ways until he reached an archway on the side of the road. It read "City Park" in great block letters. Dib turned onto the heavily wooded path, feeling a sudden chill as he was shaded from the last remnants of sunlight.

It wasn't much of a shortcut, really. But he figured a change of route would do him some good. Clear his mind out a bit.

The bare branches loomed over him in a spindly half-arch as he followed the trail deeper into the park. Scattered at steady intervals, the lamps by the side of the trail were beginning to click on. Long, slatted shadows fell across Dib while he walked, strobing around him like the bars of a cage.

Dib picked up his pace and half-jogged to the bottom of a little hill, hair-scythe swinging annoyingly in his face with every step. His feet landed so loudly on the pavement that he barely heard the chuckle sounding from the trees.

Just a single laugh, and then gone.

Dib wheeled sharply, his satchel snapping against his thigh. Even as the noise faded into the woods he wondered if he'd really heard it. He prayed and swore and begged for a cat to step daintily from behind a grizzled trunk, but the stand of trees around him was still. Silent except for the hissing wind and the buzz of the newly-lit streetlamps.

He bolted deeper into the park, nearly crashing over a see-saw as he took a shortcut through the playground. There weren't any children out at this hour, of course, but the place still seemed eerily desolate. Passing the swings meant that Dib was almost through the park – only a short dreaded stretch through the trees until he would reach the road on the other side.

He found himself walking at that awkward too-fast speed that ached his ankles, refusing to run because there wasn't any _reason_ to run. Not every half-heard sound was a monster or alien or serial killer hidden in the shadows, he tried to remind himself.

The sun was completely down now. Only a rose-colored blush in the sky indicated that there had ever been a sun at all - the cold and the trees pressing in around him made it seem plenty dark already. The playground disappeared from view behind Dib as he continued on the pathway, his vision blocked by the bared branches. He glanced compulsively over his shoulder, muscles twitching at any movement. Just a dead leaf, a squirrel, the wind moving some paper. Adrenaline roiled and calmed within him over and over as he made his way down the path.

The trees were thinning, the trail getting mercifully wider. Dib could make out a stone wall beyond some of the tree limbs and trunks and knew he was nearly to the edge of the park. Nearly free of the claustrophobic forest. The trees ended at the corner just beyond him, and beyond that was only a block of sidewalk until he reached the furthest edge of his subdivision.

Dib thundered down the last bit of path, clearing the three or so steps down to the sidewalk in a single jump. He turned to glance behind him almost triumphantly, looking back at the forest. Trees enveloped the trail like a tunnel, making Dib feel as if he'd emerged safely form a dungeon. The open air gave him a sudden and strange sense of protection. Geez, how dumb could he have been to think he'd heard a laugh before?

Not very, apparently. A tentacle-like leg clicked onto the path, and then vanished cleanly back into the stand of trees. Dib stared fixedly at the spot where it had appeared, where the long evening shadows had made the limb spidery and threatening. Had it been metal? He wasn't sure.

On his third day as an intern, he and Agent Bill had come face-to-face with an undead demon squid. Long story. As the spectral cephalopod bore down on them, demon-beak snapping horrifically amongst wriggling tentacles, Bill had told him something very important. "You've got a lot of spunk, kid. You're brave as a damn Rottweiler. But sometimes you have to _run_. The afterlife's got plenty of members, but this world is fast running out of paranormal investigators."

Agent Bill's advice rattled through Dib's head as he turned heel and took off down the street. Every step landed heavily on the pavement and shook thoughts out of his brain until the word "run" was all that remained.

_Run, Dib. Run._

Dib sprinted across the concrete, heading down the street toward the cluster of homes at the very edge of his neighborhood. Every step came reliably now. It nearly felt good, to trust his body so completely. Not to slow or falter. Until Dib passed by the Anderson's house and watched his own shadow loping by on the off-white paneling. A spindly shadow followed him, only a few feet behind.

Dib heard footsteps. One to each of his three. Steady and slow against his own manic stomping down the sidewalk. He turned onto the Anderson's yard, feet slick on the frosty grass. Breaking through the neighborhood was a shorter route home than following the road. It was only out of the corner of his eye he saw the tall, thin shape twist mechanically to chase him out of the streetlamp's light.

His heart beat through every inch of him. He felt the blood coursing through his fingertips and pounding in his temples as his long legs gathered speed. His muscles snapped reliably into a contraction and relaxed, over and over, gushing warmth and oxygen into cells that normally went without.

Dodging gopher holes, sucking in great lungfuls of icy air, Dib crossed the lawn within seconds. His heavy boots and tramping steps scuffed the neighbor's landscaping, leaving a trail of torn-up weeds behind him.

With a single great leap he cleared the Anderson's fence, still several lawns away from his house. Dib felt the ground reverberate in his legs and stomach more than his feet as he touched down, and he wasted a precious second re-gaining his bearings. He'd landed in the Binewski's yard – they must not have been home, because every light in the house was off and the whole lawn was bathed in darkness.

Then he heard the _thing_ scrape on the white-pickets behind him. An icy stab of adrenaline lanced through Dib's veins and his boots kicked earth into the air as he ran on.

His messenger bag strap dug emphatically into his throat with the burst of speed. The instant of panicked choking scarcely slowed him down, but it brought his thoughts shuddering into focus. The file. The picture.

_You're a paranormal investigator, damn it. Take a picture._

He didn't have his good camera with him. But the cell phone in his butt pocket had four megapixels and that had to be worth something. Dib half-twisted as he ran, just in time to see a grey-shaded sliver vanish behind the Binewski's garden shed. Sweat dripped down his fingers and made his grip slippery and unsure as he tried to fish the phone into his hand without stopping.

It felt hot enough to burn in his white-knuckled fist. He snapped the phone open, screen blurry between his jittering run and sweat-fogged glasses.

Dib stopped, turned, felt the muscles in his legs go wobbly in confusion. The tiny cell-phone screen cast the only light in the darkness, illuminating the weedy grass and neglected car parts that littered the Binewski's backyard. Whipping the phone back and forth, Dib searched desperately for any sign of the tentacled monstrosity. The shadows fell in demented shapes around him and every one became a source of horror as he looked for his pursuer. It had been _right here_. The few seconds of silence and stillness became Dib's whole life lived over.

From the corner of the house, near the shed, came a stirring. It unfolded itself, appendages growing and multiplying, amplified by the darkness. The thing uncoiled like a nest of vipers. Joints popped into place with all the disturbing elegance of a rearing spider, punctuated with a hissing whisper at every movement. Within a few seconds it towered at the house's awning.

Only some miracle of conditioning reminded Dib to pound the "take" button his phone. A shocking flash of light illuminated the lawn, every shadow eliminated for an instant. Dib didn't see its face - the camera flashed too quickly and scorched his dilated pupils. He only saw the thing heave a great tentacle skyward and bring it crashing down towards him.

_You're a pretty stupid Rottweiler._

Ducking beneath the falling limb, Dib's fingers grazed the frozen ground as he pushed off into another sprint. Only one lawn left before his street. And mercifully, too, because Dib wasn't sure how much longer he could maintain this headlong dash. The cold air needled inside his lungs and clashed painfully with the hot ache spreading down his legs.

His muscles snapped easily into place this time, boots landing piston-like on the sidewalk as he broke from the Binewski's yard onto the Nicely's perfectly manicured landscaping. Was the thing still behind him? He wasn't sure. He had the picture, which was what mattered. He just had to get home.

Dead grass crunched beneath his boots as he crossed the Nicely's lot. He listened half-hopeful, half-terrified for the tell-tale skittering behind him. Dib's breath came in ragged gasps now, body demanding oxygen, so loud every noise of the winter night was half-drowned. But not the rhythmic, clicking footsteps that sounded right behind him.

Dib cleared the Nicely's yard without incident, nearly tripping as he stomped from the plush grass onto the road that ran in front of his house. Without hesitation, without any thought to cars or trucks that might flatten him into a Dib-shaped pancake, he bolted across the street toward his front door.

He was so close now. He could see the chip on the first step, make out the flashing light of the T.V. inside the living room. Fifty more feet. Forty.

Every cell screamed. Every synapse launched neurotransmitters like an armada launches ships. He stared with laser-beam focus at his front door, the rest of the neighborhood collapsing to powder around him for all he noticed.

_Faster, Dib. You're almost there._

A spiked and knuckled leg appeared suddenly on the ground before him. Even if he'd had a year's early notice Dib couldn't have stopped in time. The toe of his boot caught neatly on tentacle and he fell a thousand miles in the six feet between his brain and the earth, the rocky asphalt rocketing toward him. Dib threw his arms out and caught most of the impact on his hands.

His phone smashed like an egg, brittle plastic shards scattering into his palms as much as the ground. Somewhere, part of Dib's brain lamented the destruction. He thanked every god back to Horus for adrenaline, which masked the agony as the skin of his hands came grinding off onto the pavement. There wasn't any time for pain.

The distant streetlights wavered surreally like UFOs, and Dib wondered vaguely if the fall might have jarred his brain a bit. He imagined lying down in the blood skimmed across the road, burning cheek against the icy ground. Half-fixated on the idea of resting, Dib levered himself up again, the weight of his messenger bag suddenly very real and exhausting. He'd nearly forgotten it was there. Dib stumbled a few more feet toward the house, feeling his legs go weak in complaint at such a teasing stop.

Something grasped his shoulder. Almost gently, something grazed his neck and tugged softly at the strap of his satchel. He was being touched in some light and perverted way, and even the numbing ice water that shrieked through his arteries wouldn't lie about that.

The universe snapped into focus. He saw the curved roof and the flickering windows of the house and the half-open garage with such clarity that the detail ached his eyes. And the moment he moved again, the something clawed angrily at his bag and jacket like it was being denied. A hollow hiss sounded behind him.

But Dib ran. He covered the final twenty yards to his door instantaneously. With a bloodied hand Dib tore the thing nearly off its hinges, hurled himself into the living room, and slammed his body against the door to close it.

* * *

><p><em>Looks like we survived to the end of the chase scene...if you passed out due to boredom or confusion, then that would be an awesome thing to let me know about in a review! Or, you know, any other comments or questions that come to mind. Chapter 4 is going to have some GazDib interaction, so if that sounds neat, then I'd invite you to stay tuned. Otherwise, thanks for reading! It's you guys out there that keep me posting!_


	4. The House

****_I'm glad you guys liked the chase! Seriously, every single review I've gotten for this has been helpful and inspiring, so I just wanted to thank you all SO MUCH from the bottom of my medium-sized American heart (Any the National fans out there? No? Okay, moving on). It's good reviews that keeps sites like this going. This chapter isn't near so action-packed as the last, unfortunately, but it's also shorter, so maybe that'll make up for it. _

_Also, Gaz has a filthy mouth. Must have learned that from me. _

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 4: The House<strong>

Dib's body was somewhere around 75% water. He felt every drop of it wavering gently, like a wind-stroked sea, within him as he leaned against the inside of the door. His breathing came in painful, pounding gasps and the living room shuddered with colors he knew weren't there. Dib shut his eyes against the movement and crouched near the floor, feeling every tiny pain in his joints amplified a million times as the adrenaline leaked out of his bloodstream.

_You're safe. You're safe. It's okay. It can't get in the house. Probably._

Each thought was punctuated by a deep and heaving breath. He might have laid there all night, exhaustion drugging him into false security, had his sister not been playing video games on the couch a few feet away.

"Go left, asshat. MY left. And don't touch that rocket launcher!"

It took Dib a heart-pounding few seconds to realize that Gaz was speaking into her gaming headset and not screaming at him. He snapped his eyes open and stared at his sister's controlled flailing. She didn't seem to have even noticed he'd come home.

"Wait. I'm reloading. Wait wait wait. Hold up hol- YOU FUCKING CAMPERS!" and in a dramatic display that rattled the room Gaz lifted her controller above her head and hurtled it toward the ground as the T.V. erupted in a show of red mist. Snarling, shoving half-curled violet hair out of her eyes, Gaz finally turned and looked disapprovingly down at her brother.

"What's wrong with you?" she demanded, likely more out of curiosity than concern. Dib took his sister's consistent abrasiveness as a comfort rather than a flaw anymore. Gaz was as patiently unchanging as the earth itself, and in a world of SATs and college applications and an elusive father her coarse stability had become somewhat of a sticking place for his sanity.

He slowly pulled himself up to his full height, bracing heavily against the door, and still felt intimidated by Gaz's glare.

"Gaz, I think I might've been-" he began, holding his palms out pleadingly. Gaz recoiled in disgust.

"You're bleeding on the floor, Dibshit."

What had felt like a bump before became an aching sear as Dib stared down at his hands for the first time since he'd come in. Rivulets of blood were pooling in the folds of his hands where he'd skinned them. His fingers quivered without his beckoning and threw crimson between the crooks of his knuckles and onto the already stained carpet below.

"Come on, lemme look at that before you bleed to death in the foyer." Gaz said, grabbing him roughly by the front of his shirt.

"But I have to-"

"In a damn minute." She snapped.

Dib stepped toward her and felt his coat pull against his tired muscles. The high-collared jacket that had been such a boon before suddenly felt like a straitjacket, vacuum sealing heat and moisture against his burning skin. He tore it off, clawing at the fabric like an animal in a trap, heaving his messenger bag aside along with it. The sleeves scraped his mangled palms agonizingly and he yelped aloud. Gaz made no effort to hide a smirk as she walked into the kitchen with him trailing miserably behind her.

He threw himself onto one of the kitchen chairs. As he watched Gaz shuffling through the cabinets, assembling peroxide and paper towels and medical strips, he was glad that the hotness in his cheeks hid his embarrassment.

"Something chased me," he blurted out. Gaz scarcely flicked her eyes at him as he spoke. "I think it was tall, with extra legs like a spider and its face was hard to see. I even got a picture of it, but it tripped me and I broke the phone. I'm not sure if it's still outside or not..."

"You broke another phone?" Gaz asked. She pulled a chair up next to him at the kitchen table and took one of his long-fingered hands in hers. The peroxide stung fiercely and Dib bit back a cry, determined not to give his sister anymore amusement or make himself seem any less competent.

"This is bigger than _phones_, Gaz. This is about me being hunted down by a monster the same day I get my first solo investigation case. Doesn't that seem a little weird to you?" His voice had become fast-paced and breathy.

Looking up at him, Gaz sighed impatiently. She jerked at his wrist more than necessary while wrapping up the ground-up skin on his palms.

"Did you take your medication today?" she asked evenly.

Dib sat stunned for a moment, before letting a little hiss of frustration escape between his teeth. "I haven't been on anything for three years, Gaz. Not even to help me sleep."

"You ought to be on _something_. No one sane bites their fingernails as bad as you do." She snapped, looking up at him deliberately with her thin-eyed glare that had been the same since they were children. "You remember why dad let you take that job, Dib? Wasn't it so that you didn't have to bother us with all of this supernatural bullshit? I know you got lucky with Zim, but you can't keep bringing this crap home."

"I think I should be able to bring it home if- Eeagh! Be careful!"

Dib squeaked in protest, half in pain as she mopped blood from his other hand and half as he stopped a sentence mid-thought. It was pointless to debate with her. Pointless to insist that the chase had been real, especially without any evidence. Even now, in the quiet awkwardness of their kitchen, he was beginning to doubt himself. The excitement and hormones had faded away, leaving a strange sick emptiness. How many good looks had he gotten at the thing?

Besides, she had mentioned Zim. The Irken's name had nearly become a code that he'd missed the memo on. It meant "Dib, we're glad you saved the world, but shut the hell up already." Gaz wouldn't say so much. She could have destroyed him with the right combination of rhetoric and cruelty (Dib had seen her do so much to the few other students who had the gall to harass her) but continuously did not.

She had stopped short. Given him a warning. He took it with all the cowed uneasiness of a bad dog being fed.

"I'm sorry. It's just that this new case...it's made me a little nervous, I guess. Kids disappearing, tall pointy monsters. I can't decide if it's more interesting or terrifying. The whole thing just reminds me of-" He watched her raise an eyebrow, daring him to annoy her "-of something bad. I'm starting to wonder if I might be in over my head here."

Dib ran one bandaged hand through his hair, watching the floor as Gaz repaired his other.

After an agonizing few seconds, his sister thought of something to say. "You probably are, moron. But if the case is really as bad you say, you should just man up and solve it. Then it'll stop bothering you and you can stop bothering _me_ about it."

"Well said." Dib paused, kicking this advice around in his head. Gaz was still holding one of his hands and he felt some sudden desperate urge to keep her near him. "I didn't see you at lunch today" he said, trying to change the subject.

"I was in the corner with the guys. Carl got Arson-Murder-Jaywalk 5 for his Game Slave and I wanted to see what the graphics were like. They're shit, by the way." She rubbed her nose compulsively with her free hand. "What difference is it to you? Don't you sit with those geeks near the window?"

"They're not geeks, they're _nerds_." He corrected her. "And you could come sit with us sometime. If you wanted. I have a bad feeling about that Carl kid."

"Oh, what, like you think he's a pervert or something?"

"No, I think he might be one of the bear/pig/human hybrids I've been reading about. They infiltrate human skools and eat only people who have AB blood. You can tell by their pupils - they're iridescent like a cat's."

He expected Gaz to bitch at him for bringing up the paranormal again. Snorting, rolling her eyes, and squeezing his hand painfully, she got up from the table.

"You're so full of B.S., Dib. I dunno why you're not trying to be a lawyer." Gaz jerked her head toward the living room. "I got another match at 7:00. Team needs a sniper. There's a casserole in the fridge."

"Thanks. I'm not really hungry right now, though - I think I'll just head upstairs and look at my case." Dib stood up gingerly, his back and legs beginning the three-day-long ache from overextending himself a half-hour earlier.

"You better eat that damn casserole, Dib. I made it myself and it tastes like shit. If I have to eat it, so do you." Gaz called, already taking up her post on the sofa.

Gathering up his jacket and messenger bag from where he'd dropped them in the foyer, Dib wandered up to the sanctity of his room. He left the door open, propping it with a shoe so it wouldn't swing shut and so he could hear Gaz downstairs playing video games. It wasn't until he'd settled down in his desk chair that exhaustion jittered over him like a swarm. He wanted to sleep right then, in his sweat-stiff shirt and five-pounds boots, waking up six hours later with a cricked neck.

_C'mon, Dib. Get it together. Just finish this one thing, then you can sleep._

With an unnatural amount of effort Dib yanked his messenger bag over to his side. He slid out the case file and removed the Slenderman photograph. For a second or two he stood suspended, nearly daring himself to turn it over. To compare the apparition with what he swore he'd seen chasing him. In the end the fear was too recent and he kept the picture turned away from him, sliding the thing into his scanner without ever seeing a sliver of color.

Dib shuffled a box of tissues and a stolen bottle of Gaz's lotion off of his desk as he waited for the computer to warm up. His eyes wandered aimlessly around his workspace while the startup sequence initiated, finally landing on the framed medal hung on the wall. It was blue and star-shaped and about the size of his fist. Underneath was a tiny plaque reading:

**In Congratulations to Dib Membrane, for His Effort in Revealing the Reality of Extraterrestrial Life. **

That had been his reward for so many years of work - a medal and three front-row tickets to a vivisection.

Dib grimaced bitterly at the sight of the thing, turning back to his computer. Within a few seconds he'd connected his webcam and gotten another of the Swollen Eyeballs on the line with him.

"Agent Tunaghost, would you mind taking a look at this photo for me? I think that this...monster has been sighted near my home. I'd like to know if you've heard of any other cases involving something similar." Dib always felt a little intimidated speaking to these much more experienced researchers, but he'd used up all his fear for the day.

The dark shadow of Agent Tunaghost twitched an eyebrow as the photograph reached the other end of the connection. "I feel like I've seen something like this before. Tall, spider-like, elusive. Seen often near forests and related to the disappearances of children, if I'm not mistaken."

Dib sat up a little straighter in his chair.

"Where did you read that? When? Could you send the data to me?" He asked, trying hard to keep the demanding tone out of his voice. More sightings and more cases meant more sources for evidence. Better chances of solving a mystery and securing another victory for the paranormal sciences.

"It was just a few weeks ago, Agent Mothman. I believe that another investigator in the next county over received a case very similar to your own. In this instance it was an eight-year-old girl gone missing. I'm sending the files over right now."

Dib's printer whirred to life like a little robot and began spitting out page after page of text-thick case files. He stared in disbelief at his good fortune spewing out of the mechanical mouth.

"Tuna, this is incredible." She giggled coyly at him. "Overlapping cases so close together? I can't believe I get to solve this! Look at this, it says that most of the sightings were during the day! I have to remember to take my night-vision goggles along, though. A connection to fire? That's messed up, especially if the thing spends all its time in forests. Thanks a ton, agent. I promise, when I solve this case, I'll put your name on the report."

The pages finally stopped printing and he assembled all of them in his lap, reading the first few lines of each and then abandoning it for another. A veritable library of details (for such a small, new discovery, anyway), and Dib found himself so captivated that he nearly forgot Agent Tunaghost was on the line.

"Hehe, that won't be necessary. An investigator's first case should be his and his alone. And one more thing, Agent Mothman. Before you sign off."

"Yeah?" he asked, still shuffling through the papers.

"Be careful. The agent who took the last Slenderman case hasn't been heard from in eighteen days."

* * *

><p><em>Dun dun duuuuuun. I'm sure this isn't going to come up again! In other news, the next two chapters are going to need a butt-ton of revising. Here, "revising" is a word which means "likely a total overhaul." So I'm sorry if the next update is a bit slow in coming. We're at that sort of awkward place in the story where lots of groundwork is being laid but not a lot is being done with it. Sort of the late-first-act or early-second-act lull. If you can stand to be patient with me, I promise that everything has a purpose. <em>

_Otherwise, if this chapter seemed sort of cute or filled you with an uncontrollable rage, drop me a line in the reviews! Until next time, darlings. _


	5. The Dream

_Gagghagh. So I don't know if revision block is a thing, but if it is, this chapter definitely gave it to me. This has been a rough, long week, too – I wanted to see the Hunger Games last night at midnight, which resulted in having to rearrange basically everything on every other day (school work, actual work, class, house stuff). It was a mess. Also because the weather's been nice here, all my professors keep relocating class to outside – which would be awesome if I didn't have the skin of a vampire, so I'm nursing a little bit of sun poisoning at the moment. _

_Also, a lovely reviewer by the name of Btch left a comment speculating about the nature of Zim/Slenderman in this fic. Her review was anonymous or else I'd respond in private. She suggested that all of this is going on as a result of Zim's Pak hijacking bodies and attacking people, which is not exactly what I have planned but IS STILL INCREDIBLY COOL AND SOMEONE SHOULD WRITE THAT STORY. Not even kidding. I would pay all the internets to read that. As it is I've got my own thing going on here, with its own Chekov's guns and resolutions. Very neat conjecture, though. _

_#TL:DR, #FirstWorldProblems, #GetOnWithTheShowAlready_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 5: The Dream<strong>

Dib slept facing the window, a spare pillow hugged to his chest. Dreaming had become a chore anymore. Maybe it preserved sanity in some people but he felt like it drained his. Every horror was real in a dream. Every mistake he'd made was amplified, everything he'd worked past was undone.

Zim was there, more often than not. Usually the alien had him strapped to an operation table, with long pointed needles and blood-covered blades looming overhead. From somewhere in the darkest corners of his vision, the Irken would crawl up onto the table, using his Pak legs to lever himself. Dib felt tightness in his chest as Zim knelt on top of him. The red eyes shone like ghost lights.

And then Zim would cradle Dib's head in his Pak legs, almost tenderly, placing one spike on his left and right temple. Just as he felt the tip begin boring into his skull, Dib would snap awake and stare wildly about his bedroom in a panic. Hysterical screaming optional.

This morning wasn't particularly different. Dib gave himself five minutes of lying perfectly still amidst the sweat-soaked sheets, counting breaths, trying to orient himself as he re-entered the world of waking.

He finally managed to roll out of bed, wrapping his arms around himself at leaving the warm blankets. His clothes were cast in a rumpled pile in the corner. Posters covered the walls patchily - some faded and torn at the edges from age, and some from his newer interests (his giant "Ghost Quest" poster served the dual purpose of being related to the paranormal and having the show's curvy, red-headed hostess as its focal point). And across from him, blinking in earnest, was his webcam light.

_Shit. Left the thing on all night._

Dib heaved himself over to his computer, a headache beckoned into existence by his motion. Poor sleep could do that. Holding his forehead in one bandaged hand, he wondered vaguely if there'd be any room left in his hard-drive after nine straight hours of hi-def recording. The webcam software snapped open the instant he tapped the spacebar, helpfully showing screenshots from every five-seconds of video. Dib scrolled through the thousands of identical shots idly, mostly out of grogginess than interest. Evidently he kicked and thrashed in his sleep, according to the footage.

The nine-gigabyte file was nearly in the delete bin before Dib saw it. An aberration five hours in. He felt a chill spread over his back unrelated to sleeping shirtless as he paused over the image.

For two minutes a narrow-bodied, square-headed and multi-limbed shadow had hovered over him as he slept. Dib watched his own form quiver under the blankets as the thing bent in through the window and touched his bare shoulder. Compulsively Dib scratched at his upper arm as he watched the video, ignoring the sting of his palms and trying to detect a scab or a bruise. Nothing there, that he could tell.

After about a hundred and twenty seconds, the figure vanished in a _pop_ of strange purple light.

The pounding in his skull was getting worse. Dib blinked away the goo that had gathered in the corners of his eyes. He made several copies of the footage, stashed in different places across his computer, and then deleted the larger file.

Hundreds of shrieking, violent, demented thoughts rushed to the forefront of his brain, crowding his near-migraine and demanding attention and brooding and angst. Dib forced them all aside. He focused hawk-like on his hands as he picked out an outfit for the day, changed the blade in his razor, tossed a towel over the warmer and finally climbed into the scalding shower.

And then he curled into a ball beneath the halo of rushing water.

If he felt most vulnerable asleep, then Dib felt safest in the shower. It was the only place in the world free of obligations. Besides, Irkens were allergic to water. A moronic and limited form of protection, but one that soothed him nonetheless. The heat calmed his headache and left his jumbled thoughts stripped bare within his brain.

Whatever had chased him on the way home from work was in that video. It had watched him sleep and the idea made Dib shiver like a child even in the steamed bathroom. He felt dirtier with every second. The fear of that _thing_ crawled down deep inside of his innards and grabbed hold of something near his liver.

_Yeah, but that picture's got to be worth something. You know it was real now. At least you know you're not just overreacting and seeing shit because-_

"Stop." Dib whispered aloud to himself. The fact that it was odd to do so in the shower barely occurred to him. He could be bathing in ancient Rome for all the attention he was paying the dingy grout and Gaz's fifteen shampoo bottles.

Dib resented this sort of evidence. Circumstantial. It was worse than no proof at all. The shadow was enough to frighten him, enough to make him see movement in every corner and walk with his back to the wall. He would swear his own damned soul that there was a monster or an alien or _something_ in that picture, hovering over him as he slept. He knew it with the same certainty that he knew Bigfoot lived in matriarchal societies and that the Jersey Devil wore size eleven shoes.

_Stop avoiding the issue, Dibshit. That's Zim in that picture. You know it as well as I do. He knows where you live, remember?_

In a flurry of motion Dib stood up, sliding foolishly against the slick tile and shaking water from his hair in an attempt to clear his mind. The headache returned in all its thrashing glory. Dib focused on the pain, reveled in it, as he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and took to raking his stunted fingernails through his hair, trying to scrape his brain free of that same stupid redundant thought.

His head began to throb - a pulsing ache behind his temples as if his skull was full of shaken razorblades. Dib faltered against the side of the shower, vision starting to blur and discolor in the pain. Heat from the bathroom clogged his lungs and flushed his brain. The worst migraine he'd ever had was coming on fast.

His distorted vision suddenly started to snap back into focus around him. The pain didn't lessen, but at least he could half see again. Colors shaded in, edges grew sharper, but Dib started to realize that the wider he opened his eyes, the more grotesque the scene around him became.

Where the grimy tile walls should have been he saw long, steel bars covered in spikes. The shower had become a cage around him, an Iron Maiden. Any motion and he'd be speared through. Dib sucked a breath across his back teeth, whimpering in horror at the transformation. Blood stuck grittily to the bottom of his bare feet, and he felt the pointed bars needling his trembling, naked skin.

There was a clacking sound above him. The showerhead was still where it was supposed to be. Only now, instead of water, he saw a putrid green vapor had begun to leak out. His mind raced immediately to the gassing chambers of Auschwitz. In a screeching panic Dib reached out and shook the sharp cage walls, ignoring the agony in his re-opened hand wounds. He just had to get out-

And in a flash of being the shower took shape again. Tepid water misted off of his back from the perfectly benign showerhead. He looked down at his hands and realized he'd pulled the curtain liner down. A puddle had begun forming on the bathmat outside of the tub.

Safe. Fine. Normal. No sign of the hallucination, which had lasted maybe thirty seconds at most.

Dib ran a hand through his still-soapy hair and then tried shakily to put the shower curtain rod back in place. He found himself staring at every small thing - the ingredients in Gaz's conditioner, the texture of the soap in the dish, the gunk beneath his fingernails - to be sure that this was the right dimension.

It was just this case. It just struck a little too close to home and was screwing him up. As soon as he'd worked on it - interviewed the mother of the missing boy, gathered some more information - this would all go away. He'd solve it, realize that all this freaking out was over nothing, and that Zim was really gone forever and Gaz was right, he really was a goddamned moron sometimes.

Dib turned the shower off and grabbed his towel. He'd tried a thousand different drying and combing and hair-gel methods, but nothing would make the great jagged spike of hair lay flat, and anymore he mostly ignored it. The black scythe shook distractedly at him from the mirror as he dried himself off and pulled on a pair of dirty jeans and a tee-shirt.

He spent a few minutes gathering papers, packing his bag, struggling his still-sticky boots onto his feet. He found himself fabricating tiny chores to do. When all the trash cans were empty, the toilet paper rolls filled, the security system re-calibrated, Dib finally admitted to himself that he needed to leave. The sooner he moved forward with the case, the better.

He stopped in the foyer behind the couch, where Gaz had already situated herself for the day. Some show about serial killers blared on the T.V. as she pounded buttons on her Gameslave.

"Hey Gaz? Can you do me a favor?"

"Yeah?" she growled, barely looking up.

"Be careful today. Stay inside. And if anything weird happens, please call dad or something, okay? I really think...something bad might be going on." He spoke instinctively, before his better judgment reminded him that Gaz _hated_ his cryptic paranoid ramblings. The headache that had dulled during breakfast returned in full force, so bad that he closed his eyes and missed Gaz's dangerously agitated expression.

"You're such a whiny bitch, Dib." A heavy sigh. "But if it will make you shut up, then sure. I'll be _careful_." The sarcasm soaking her finally word was so thick it seemed to hang in the air. It was the best he could expect, really. Dib nodded once, opened the door, and walked into the bleached winter Saturday.

The next step in these sorts of cases, after gathering background information (Dib's messenger bag would scarcely zip closed, it was so packed with papers) was interviewing witnesses. Dib pounded Mrs. Finch's address into the family compact's GPS, parked half-in and half-out of the overfull garage. Their dad had bought a crappy foreign car when Dib got his driver's license and Gaz her learner's - good enough to get them around town but not heartbreaking if it should get wrapped around a tree.

Throwing his messenger bag onto the passenger's seat, Dib gave the neighborhood one last scrutinizing glance. No movement or shadows that he could see - just one of the neighbor's dogs digging through a garbage can. He climbed into the car and shifted into reverse.

The day was overcast, threatening rain with a strange pressure in the air and a solid white sheet of cloud cover. Dib found himself hoping vaguely for a storm as he drove. Occasionally the flight of a bird or a plastic bag blown across the road would make him jerk the steering wheel in a panic. A drop in his stomach, a spiking pain in his thigh, and then gone.

Sometimes the vision was a shadow. A mass of black: thin, elegant and spiked. He'd see blood spilled across the pavement ahead and looked in desperation for a dead cat nearby and noticed none. When the car got closer the blood puddles would turn to water steeping on the road and the haunting figures vanished.

If someone had put a gun to his head Dib wouldn't have known if the things he saw were real, imagined out of paranoia or side-effects of his blistering headache. Maybe a little of all three.

He was immensely relieved to reach the Finch house in one piece - moving around without being surrounded by a 2000-pound Korean weapon felt surprisingly freeing. Dib took a moment to clip his I.D. badge with the unflattering photo onto his shirt before he got out of the car. His boots crunched on the gravel driveway as he looked around. The house was small, with a mid-70s look to it and the ratty landscaping and flaked paint that whispered of neglect.

Every minute of Dib's childhood that he could recall had been spent in a town. There had always been the buzz of streetlights, the lowing of traffic, the yelping of neighbors. Out here, on the farthest edge of town, was nothing. The little house was surrounded on nearly all sides by stalk-like trees, stripped bare in the winter chill. Dib shrunk against the wideness of the sky and the isolation of the place.

Walking up to the door, messenger bag in place across his shoulder, he stared fixedly at the porch and tried to ignore the forest as it closed slowly around him. Dib stepped up onto the creaking, water-warped porch and rang the doorbell.

After a minute or two of shuffled banging the front door finally creaked open. A woman about his father's age looked up at him blearily, hands twisted into her skirt, dark hair back in a ponytail.

"Morning." Dib held out one hand for her to shake. She just continued to stare at him, and he crumpled his fingers and pulled his arm back to his side. "My name is Dib Membrane. I'm a paranormal investigator sent from the firm you contacted a few days ago about..." (he paused awkwardly, not sure if there was a painless way to say it) "your son's disappearance."

A light of recognition seemed to go off in Mrs. Finch's eyes - he got the sense that she was only just now seeing him.

"Right. Of course. I'd thought that I'd seen all the investigators. Please, come in." She spoke with an automatic politeness that Dib rarely found on his cases. Usually witnesses or victims were impossible to shut up, greedy for attention - not unlike he'd been when he was younger, he realized.

Dib followed her into the house, crinkling his nose ever so slightly at the foreign, bitter smell of another home. Sure, the Membrane house reeked of burnt agar and chemicals and old pizza, but it was _their_ smell.

He wove his lanky form through knick-knacks and cramped furniture into an almost laughably dated living room, complete with plastic wood-grained paneling and carpet the color of rust. Mrs. Finch waved for him to sit down, and he threw himself onto a canvas-covered sofa and opened his messenger bag, digging out a tiny notebook and a pen.

It was only when Dib looked up that he realized she had left him alone. He glanced around the room, at the floor covered in toy spaceships and dinosaurs. This kid had good taste.

Mrs. Finch shuffled back into the room, bringing him a glass of metallic water that he hadn't asked for. He set the cup down a nearby side table as she took up residence on an armchair across from him.

"I can only imagine how difficult this must be." he began. The words felt hollow and meaningless, but Bill had taught him that remaining professional at all times was the key to being taken seriously as a paranormal investigator. Right now it just made Dib feel like a lawyer. "But it would be really helpful if you could describe to me anything unusual that went on in the days leading up to Joby's disappearance. Maybe you saw some weird lights in the sky, or he talked about seeing something in the woods or had a lot of bad dreams - a lot of times kids can catch things that adults don't."

_Damn straight._

Any satisfaction Dib felt with that sentence disintegrated as Mrs. Finch sighed. She looked away from him, staring at some point beyond the living room wall that he could never hope to see. Grief had left some simultaneous weight and emptiness in her posture, as if gravity was stronger here. Dib felt a sudden rush of uneasy guilt and embarrassment at being there at all - this sort of pain should be private, not to be seen by a dweeby teenage investigator.

After a moment or two of aching silence she looked up at him. "Joby always talked about weird things. He'd tell me he saw UFOs, or ghosts, or choo-chooba-"

"Chupacabras, you mean?"

"That's the one. I guess my point is that it wasn't particularly unusual for him to mention seeing strange things around. I probably should have..." and with a choking whimper she dragged a sleeve across her face. Dib made a point of scribbling down some half-assed notes as he waited for her to collect herself.

"I probably should have paid more attention. _I _never noticed anything weird, no. But he mentioned there was a tall animal in the woods. Evidently it didn't like to be seen, so Joby always made a big deal about his 'sightings.' He said it was like...a stick bug, but with a face like a person. Oh, and it didn't have a nose. That was very important for him to mention" (she chuckled softly and Dib felt the break in her somberness like a chilled beer on a hot day) "It was such a weird description that I figured he was just imagining something he'd seen in his books. Or playing pretend - you know how kids do. Is that the sort of information you're after?"

"Th-that's great, Mrs. Finch. That's really helpful." Dib's pen scratched noisily across his notebook and he wondered how close his father had come to having the same conversation with a police officer. He'd been lucky as a child, he realized - dicking around with different dimensions and aliens and the undead - and came out of all of it with a few classy scars. Physically, anyway.

"Where did you see Joby last?"

"He'd been playing out in the woods. I remember, because he has this model of the Space Station that he carries around with him, and before he went out I told him to leave it inside so he wouldn't lose it. I haven't seen it around since then…" She glanced around the room worriedly, as if expecting the toy and her son with it would materialize amidst the Ikea furniture, and Dib got the distinct feeling that he was wearing her thin.

They stumbled through a few more questions – "Was the house built on a burial ground of any kind?" "Are you aware of any gravitational abnormalities nearby?" "Have you, or anyone in your family, ever been an elf?" – before Dib managed to find an excuse to make his way back to his crappy car. He was just as glad to be done with it; he hated the awkward and exploitive mood of interviewing. Chasing things down or running tests in a dark, quiet lab was really much more his speed.

His messenger bag strap dug into his neck as he stomped down the steps of the front porch, carefully watching the ground. Carefully trying to avoid spending the rest of the day staring into the forest, looking desperately for any sign of movement. Things seemed to move at the very edge of his peripheral vision, until finally Dib twisted his neck around and looked over at the wall of trunks. He'd fought his curiosity before - he could do it again.

_No, you can't._

Dib made it halfway to the car before he glanced up into the wall-like forest. The branching trunks metronomed in the wind, rousing up otherworldly creaking sounds as the wood strained nearly to breaking. He felt some small sigh of relief release itself when no horrors made themselves immediately present. In daylight the trees looked much less foreboding than they had the night before, when he'd been running home in twilight. There was certain elegance about winter trees spread lace-like against the winter sky, he had to admit.

Then a stalking, equally elegant shadow that he hadn't noticed slid behind a tree and disappeared from his view.

* * *

><p><em>If this chapter feels a bit off, that's probably because it was originally two much longer ones. I realized that the last thing the world needs is more filler, so I consolidated them into one long-ish chunk. Maybe not the best editing choice I've ever made, especially considering that I am exhausted right now and probably missed quite a few things, but it got all of us about eight pages closer to a big hunk of violence. I think that's something everyone can look forward to. If you notice any especial weirdnessanachronisms that I didn't catch, or have any other opinion in general, I'd love to hear a review about it so I can try and fix it!_

_Otherwise, dears, Aunt Donnie has a very important meeting with a couple of Excedrin and her Jurassic Park DVDs. _


	6. The Forest

_Here we go again, my darlings. Just a little warning: this chapter's got gore. I don't think it's quite bad enough to raise the rating (although please let me know if you disagree), but things are about to get somewhat gruesome and bloody and I really think you all should have a heads-up about that. Reader discretion advised and whatnot._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 6: The Forest<strong>

Dib stared fixedly at the spot where the shadow had appeared.

Every Robert Frost-esque thought that had graced his mind before fled Dib like so many birds. Whatever duct in his brain pumped out "fear" heaved in exhaustion as he tried to memorize where the thing had stood.

Veering away from his car, Dib dashed across the lawn and headed into the tree line. The woods were barely sheltering - every frozen wind and beam of bleached light reached him through the spindly branches. If anything he felt cornered.

"Is there anybody here?" he called lamely, rattling his aching head as he looked desperately around the forest for any sign of life. Leaves and mud caked themselves onto his boots as he tried to slog deeper without a path.

The wind picked up a bit. Above him the trees moaned creakily, bending in the same direction as the sudden storm of leaves that filled the whole forest with twitching movement. Dib felt his coat flutter around him as he walked among the wind and the trees.

With a sudden crunching _crack_, a branch worked its way free and fell to the ground a few dozen feet away from him. Dib watched it smack against a few other trees as it tumbled down. And then he watched it gather to its six-ish long legs and rear up to a height a little greater than his own.

It didn't disappear.

It fled.

Dib tore after it.

Running through trees proved much trickier than sprinting across pavement - he found himself ducking under low tree limbs, getting stuck in rocky holes and skidding across hidden muddy patches. Always the monster was just beyond him. Skittering swiftly across the forest floor, but rarely faltering in its step.

He could see it more clearly now in the daylight. Not perfectly - his fogged glasses and ragged breath made note-taking a little difficult - but he could make out the nearly-black body. Clustered, pointed legs leveraged off of trees and every once and a while the thing turned a wide, dark eye to him.

Something about it didn't look right. Zim or not. There was a smallness, a weakness there that he hadn't noticed before in his handful of sightings.

_You're the hunter now. Of course it doesn't look the same as when it was chasing you. Of course it doesn't look the same as when it was hiding behind road signs. Of course it doesn't look the same as when it was an alien living down the street. Now stop thinking and _hunt_!_

Dib took the order. He heaved himself over a boulder, landing hard as the shuddering force of impact rocketed through his right leg. Scrambling to his feet, he scraped one hand open on a tree branch. Damp wetness streaked down his fingers, breadcrumbing blood behind him as he chased the dark figure.

The joints he'd used yesterday screamed in protest at his speed. He felt his muscles and tendons snap against his bones like cheap rope. Dib locked his eyes on the fleeing monster, breath coming in aching snarls, mind empty of words but full of pulsing instincts. A heat had blossomed somewhere deep within him that launched him forward despite each physical complaint. An awakening that had lain dormant for years.

Dib had to catch it. He had to lay his hands on its shoulders and twist it around and _know_. He loved the paranormal because it begged to be explained. He'd always been the one screaming to know what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, demanding for a non-ambiguous interpretation of "the Lady and the Tiger." Never satisfied with uncertainty. If he ran a little faster, strode a little longer, there would be one less mystery in the world.

One less to torment him.

The thing skittered sideways as one leg landed in a mud puddle, pivoting on the stuck limb before wresting itself free in a panicked frenzy and slipping through two tightly-placed trees. Dib dodged around, too wide to risk following it. A yard or two was lost in the detour but the shadow stayed in sight. With an obscene sucking sound he stomped into the spot of mud and freed himself in a single fluid motion.

Trees flew past. Branches snagged and tore at his clothes. Leaves clung to his boots and got caught in the strap of his messenger bag. All without Dib's notice. Even as his feet pounded onto packed, bare ground instead of leaf mulch. Even as the trees thinned to nothing.

As Dib broke the tree line his focus was only on the evading shadow. It nearly fell onto clearing, legs splayed awkwardly for a split second. The monster-hunter within Dib saw the hesitation, the pause, and took it. He launched himself forward, dirt flying free of the packed earth. Five fingers closed around one of the surprisingly warm, stalk-like legs. He had it.

It slipped through his sweat-and-bloodied hand and was gone.

In the time it took Dib to reorient himself, to regain his balance from the lost grasp and shifted weight, the thing vanished through the trees. He saw it sneak speedily away through his peripheral vision as he avoided face-planting into the soil.

Dib pulled himself to his full height, his hair-spike whistling through the air as he tried desperately to regain sight of the thing. His grab had been stupid and impulsive and he should have _known_ better, damn it. He opened his mouth to swear but screamed instead.

The scene before him unfolded with increasingly finer details, like an Escher painting. A single tree occupied the center of the clearing, bearing jagged branches that jutted into space more like broken bones than lace.

A man was impaled on the lowest limb. There was a snapped branch emerging from his chest where his sternum should have been. Bloodied shards of wood littered the ground beneath in gravestone-like clusters. Dib felt a sticky dryness in his half-open mouth as he stared at the gaping stomach, organs spilled onto the ground like streamers and skin delicately pinned back with pointed sticks.

The meaty smell of decomp crammed itself into Dib's nostrils - it worked its way into his pores and became a coating more than an odor. The smell did it for him, although the agonized, unfocused stare on the man's face was little help. Dib felt bile pressing against his throat and fell to his knees and retched onto the forest floor. A pilgrim kneeling at the base of an altar to the grotesque.

When he looked up again the body was still there. Still rent open like a fish. His gaze slid downward from the glazed eyes to the burst chest to the I.D. badge and one missing leather shoe. Dib recognized the uniform. This was a Swollen Eyeball, just like him. The one Tunaghost had mentioned.

He'd survived eighteen days after taking his case. Dib wondered how much longer he had.

Tearing his eyes away from the name badge disturbingly like his own, Dib stared at the ground. At the base of the tree a corner of folded paper jutted from a jellied pile of nestled organs.

He tried to think about the first day of summer. Snow falling softly outside as he sat behind the living room window with a cup of hot chocolate. Looking up into the clear night sky and seeing a star he'd never noticed before. Dib forced his brain into some other calm and safe place where his hand wasn't digging around inside an eviscerated man's intestines for a piece of paper.

The sheet fell open in his hands, half-soaked with blood and serum. It took a second or so of staring before he could shake the savage image from his mind and read the words. It took him several seconds more to realize that the symbols weren't in English. Blocky, geometric hieroglyphics he'd seen before: the words were Irken.

Dib's head ached loudly, blood rushing and pooling in his ears as he looked up at the thick and crusted crimson splattered a few feet beyond him. The paper crunched under his stiff fingers.

It wasn't real. It couldn't be. Another hallucination.

He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. Wiped a line of saliva and cluster of tears from his face with one dirty sleeve. His mouth was sticky and foul-tasting, the cold air aching his teeth as he breathed. With shaking fingers, Dib reached out and touched the edge of the skewered man's jacket. The fabric was damp and coarse.

The body released a scraping, hissing moan. Dib jerked his head up in horror and watched as the man's grey eyes dilate aimlessly. He stumbled backward, tripping on what he prayed wasn't entrails, a soft whimper escaping.

_Look, I don't give a shit if this is real life or not. Call 911. Right. Now._

Dib fumbled stupidly for his cell phone before remembering that it was smashed to pieces on the sidewalk in front of his home. His sore brain cast about for the nearest gas station, pay phone, something.

His car. His car parked in front of the Finch house. She would have a phone.

Eager to get away from the reeking spectacle, Dib turned and sprinted back through the forest. His feet fell mechanically onto the ground. He stumbled and corrected himself with sluggish, instinctive motions - every cell on autopilot as he made his way back. If there had been a Bigfoot running next to him Dib wouldn't have seen it. His retinas registered the trees but the murder scene (what else could it be?) loomed so largely in his mind that there was no room for any other thought.

It hung there, branded, amidst the chaos of his migraine. The carefully peeled flesh, the muted pale of a body sans most of its blood. Dib knew a vivisection when he saw one. Someone had leaned over that man and carved him up as he screamed himself into insanity.

_Oh, right. Because we don't know anyone who's capable of that, do we, Dib?_

"Shut the hell up!" Dib panted, each word emphasized by a gasp as he ran. This had gone beyond chasing shadows in the forest. Beyond stalkers in his window. Dib brooded over the Irken message crumpled in his pocket. No amount of running was going to get him clear of the clusterfuck he'd gotten himself into.

The distance back to his car seemed much further than it had when he was chasing down the specter. He finally broke the tree cover, heel grinding into the Finch's driveway as he thundered up the stairs and pounded on the front door. An eternity passed as he waited for the shuffled banging of another person.

Finally the screen creaked open an inch.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did you forget something?" Mrs. Finch asked politely, but in his agitated state Dib found that her patience did little to calm him.

"No. I need to use your phone. It's an emergency." He spoke as evenly as he could - partly to avoid upsetting her, and partly because he knew if he raised his volume at all he would scream.

"Of course. It's in the kitchen."

There must have been something about Dib's posture or expression that convinced her, because she nearly leapt out of his way as he shoved his way into the house. Any of the smells or knick-knacks that had caught his eye before became background noise as he walked stiffly to the kitchen and picked up the telephone receiver.

The 911 dispatcher was surprisingly helpful, especially compared to all the other times Dib had called it. Then again, this time he was reporting a murder rather than a toilet-haunting ninja ghost. He found himself stuttering and pausing when the lady at the other end asked him to "describe the scene." Every detail of the gore had been etched permanently into his brain, but explaining it to a stranger over the phone felt obscene and irreverent.

Finally they had enough information. Promised to send a police officer and an ambulance. Dib hung up the phone, wondering if Mrs. Finch had heard him explain the crime scene that lurked in her backyard. She seemed to have disappeared into the house somewhere; he was keenly aware that he'd eventually need to go speak to her. Picking up the receiver again, Dib dialed his home's number.

"What?" came the growl of Gaz's voice. Despite her harshness, Dib felt a hiccup of relief break over him like warm water - the knowledge that his sister was still herself was some small comfort in the discord. In his mind's eye he saw her reading comic books on her bed, rubbing her nose with an ink-stained hand.

"Gaz, I need you to get something out of my room and meet me in town. It's very, very important, okay? This case is screwed up - people are getting hurt- and I think that Zim has something to do with it."

"Zim? Zim is gone, Dib. You saw to that yourself." She spoke with slow deliberation, as if explaining quantum physics to a dog. "And you're right, that case is hurting people. Because it's making you act insane like you did back in middle skool and I'm going to pummel you over it if you don't shut your crazy-spouting mouth."

"I know it sounds nuts. I really do, Gaz" (he really did. Dib felt the corners of his mind curl up like peeling wallpaper as he tried to comprehend the past 24 hours) "and I'm sorry to keep bothering you. But I really, really need for you to go into my room and go to the bottom left drawer on my desk and get out the third red disk that you see because-"

"Are you fucking serious! It's Saturday! I am TRYING to enjoy my weekend, and I don't need any of your big-headed paranormal bullshit messing it up. You already took the car, and now you expect me to bring you your X-ray binoculars or some shit? You better be kidding me, Dib, or so help me-"

Dib felt his former sense of relief melt away into an eruptive anger. One he usually kept well in check. "I am not _fucking_ kidding, Gaz! Did it ever occur to you that maybe some of this is important? I've spent the last five years trying to keep my mouth shut for your sake but I'm not going to dumb myself down again. I'm scared, Gaz. If I don't solve this case, if I don't figure out what's going on...you're going to end up taking me to the Crazy House or the morgue."

A pause. He could hear Gaz's rasped, angry breathing on the other end of the line. Dib waited for a dial tone, fully prepared to smash the receiver down in frustration. Then, finally:

"We're going to Bloaty's. And we're going to get bacon and jalapeno. You're going to pay. And you're going to drop me back off at the house." She said shortly.

"Sure. Absolutely. It's a deal. I'll meet you in an hour take a knife with you don't go in the forest-" The dull beeping cut him off mid-rushed-sentence. Dib snapped the receiver back into its home.

* * *

><p><em>I guess there was some language in there too. Whoops. Sorry about that. So what do you think? A bit much? Not enough? Let me know in a review! And thanks for reading, everyone. The other day my "hit" counter was "666" for an hour or so, it made me feel kind of awesome and evil and warm-fuzzy all at once. Probably you're supposed to be medicated for that, but oh well.<em>


	7. The Note

_Here you go, dears – I don't have a lot of commentary for this one. Gonna have some Gaz interaction, which is always fun. I wanted to give a shout-out THANK YOU to all my regulars – OhHowDelightfullyDreadful, watermelonwafflesBISCUITS, Sideos, Zim'sMostLoyalServant, Invader Raz, and SombodyStandingThere – for sticking with me this long. You all are an incredible bunch. Anyway, let me wipe away a few sentimental tears of joy and thankfulness, so we can go ahead and get to:_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 7: The Note<strong>

Dib waited with Mrs. Finch while the ambulance came. He tried his best talk her down amidst the bustling paramedics and leering policemen, but the sight of a body bag being dragged out of her forest sent the woman into hysterics. Bitter impatience made it difficult for him to sympathize at that point - she hadn't even seen the corpse in all its eviscerated glory. Then he felt like an insensitive bastard for begrudging the mother of a missing child some sympathy.

He left the house feeling like a bad omen, leaving destruction wherever he went. Despite his sick exhaustion, Dib's pleasureless desire to move forward grated on him and he knew Gaz would not wait for long.

Dib took a booth at Bloaty's without actually being able to remember how he'd gotten there. Far from the doors, beyond the windows and with his back against the wall. The entire drive, parking the car, sitting down and ordering his soda - it had all happened in an amnesia-like daze. Maybe his brain was shutting down to protect itself. Maybe it really was amnesia.

Every squealing child and breaking cup in the restaurant launched Dib into a paroxysm of shaking and adrenaline, his omnipresent headache pounding warningly. He finally popped open his Netbook and took to playing Solitaire and gnawing on his fingernails in an ineffective attempt at calming himself down.

Only a few dazed minutes passed before he saw Gaz's purple skirt and black "BAND" tee-shirt hovering beyond the glass doors. She stomped into the restaurant, shooing sticky children out of her way and making a B-line for his corner. Gaz stopped at the end of the table and loomed predatorily over Dib's slumped form.

With one finger she prodded him pointedly on the forehead. "Look, Dib. I don't know if you're having an emotional breakdown or what the hell is going on. But if you don't get your shit together then I'm going to check you into the Crazy House or the morgue _myself_. I'm just starting to have a normal life and I don't want your weirdness to ruin that again." She spoke with an understated hiss of annoyance that he knew was far more dangerous than her normal, everyday insults.

There had been a time when he exhausted himself to avoid her anger - conditioned to prevent any positive punishment she could dole out - but right now her threats felt dull and distant and meaningless. A hangnail during chemotherapy. She seemed frustrated by his unresponsiveness and sighed hoarsely.

"It took me ten damn minutes to find this thing. I hope it has pretty good porn on it." Gaz deadpanned, sliding into the seat across from him and tossing the magenta disk at his head.

"It's not porn." Dib said pointlessly, cramming the CD into his drive. "It's a program for reading Irken." He booted the software, pulling the sheet of paper out of his pocket that had been clinging stickily to his thigh and trying all the while to avoid Gaz's piercing gaze.

"Irken! You made me get dressed and come all the way down here just so you could dick around with some five-year-old program! Why the hell would you need to read Irken? The only Irken on the planet-" She began, before Dib slid the crumpled mess across the table toward her.

Unfolding the paper gingerly, Gaz wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Where did you get this? It smells like it's been on a corpse."

"It was. I had to dig it out of a pile of organs with my bare hands."

Dib instantly regretted his brashness. He regretted the way that Gaz stared at him over the top of his netbook screen in a mixture of skepticism and horror. Eyebrow raised, mouth open crookedly, whiteness visible around her brown irises. He regretted dumping grotesque, out-of-context details on his sister which undoubtedly didn't make him seem any saner. And he regretted having to pluck the reeking page back out of her limp hands in order to translate the galactic cuneiform that covered it.

"You found a _body_ during your _internship_?" She paused, almost curious. "...What was it like?"

"It was horrible, okay? Is that what you want me to say? That there was blood everywhere and it smelled like death and I got so upset I puked? It was screwed up, Gaz. That's what it was like." He heard much more bitterness and agitation in his voice than he'd intended.

Gaz slumped moodily against the vinyl seat, making an annoying squeak that jittered the silence that had fallen between them.

"Jeez. Sorry I asked."

The software was up and running now. With deliberate keystrokes he copied the symbols from the crusted paper into his computer and began the translation. Five minutes to completion. Gaz bit sloppily into a piece of pizza, the smell of it nearly turning his stomach and raising a tightness in his throat.

_Small note: consider vegetarianism._

"Eat something." Gaz demanded. He shook his head, pain blooming around his temples. "No, I'm serious. You're acting weird and it's starting to piss me off. So either eat something or tell me what's going on."

His throat was still sore from hurling in the forest. And he'd eaten Bloaty's pizza so many times that it was second on his list of "only in a desert island" foods. Dib rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses so he wouldn't have to look at her as he spoke.

"Zim's out there, somewhere. No, I don't know how. I can't explain it." He said, when he heard Gaz inhale sharply to argue with him. "But he's terrorizing people. Kids are going missing. People are getting killed. It's getting worse, Gaz. A lot worse than it ever was before."

She tilted her head, purple strands cascading into her face. It was her famous "attempting to give a shit" expression that Dib saw every time he brought up this sort of theory. The only thing missing from Gaz's moody-teenager act was a copy of "Catcher in the Rye" stuck under her arm.

"So what are you going to do about it?" she asked. "You're gonna save the world again? I would've thought that whole stoic, lonely-hero savoir complex bullshit got tiring the first time around."

Dib stared across the table at his sister, who stared just as evenly back at him.

_She should go into the military, with sniping skills like that._

"...it did." He finally worked out. "I'm not going to pretend like I didn't go a little crazy back when I was hunting Zim in middle school. But I don't care about saving the world. Not right now."

"Never thought I'd hear you say _that_," she said pointedly, taking a sip of soda. Dib narrowed his eyes and continued.

"If Zim's come back, and he's going on some rampage, then I'm the only one who can stop him."

"That still sounds like a savior complex to me. Denial always was your strong suit, Dibshit." Gaz muttered from around another piece of pizza.

"I don't know why I bother talking to you at all."

"Neither do I."

Silence hung thick in the booth, dense as the ocean's abyssal plain. Someone had smeared spackle across the chink in the wall between them - a hole where light had shown a moment before.

"Bleep-bloop! Files are done translating!" the computer interrupted his thoughts cheerfully. Grabbing hold of the laptop, he leaned forward as the note's English meaning appeared in bold font across his screen:

**Go ahead and run, earth filth. That's all you can do. Enjoy this warning, for your death will go much worse. Perhaps then you will find some sanity.**

Dib stared unblinkingly at the message for a second or two, trying to make sense of it. He felt a creeping chilly mass writhing in his stomach as he skimmed his mind over the past few days of chases and confusions.

Any doubts or hesitations that had nagged at his paranoid mind vaporized in an instant. There was no more clinging to rationalizations. The alien was skittering around the world on his spindly Pak-legs and hunting Dib like a stupid, big-headed fly. Calling him crazy, no less. Dib felt fear start to wrap itself around him like an old friend, but some part of him pushed it away. Some part that was suddenly angry.

"He's screwing with me. Trying to freak me out. This is all just some sick _game_ to him" Dib growled, eyes focused somewhere beyond Gaz but really within his own mind.

"Who is?" Gaz asked, but he ignored her.

"Well you know what, Zim? You won't get away with this! I'm done being scared. I'm done running away!" His tone was getting louder, harder, cracking insanely at consonants. Parents glanced nervously toward the back corner and held their children closer.

"Dib, people are staring. Be quiet." She spoke low and dangerous, like the warning hiss of a panther.

"Do I look like I give a _shit_ if people are staring? Have I ever, Gaz?" He snarled in a voice that was not his own.

The thing that had stirred in the forest was kicking awake within him. It was focused and vengeful - it wanted none of the wizened, strategic hunting of men. There was a wordless, instinctive animalness to it that thrashed about like had been starved. It screamed for blood, made his fingernails dig into his scabbed palms, ground his teeth.

With a careless violence that would have horrified him at any other moment Dib slammed his laptop shut and crammed it into his messenger bag. Perhaps the casing cracked, he wasn't sure. He threw himself bodily out of the booth, tossing a handful of bills onto the table and storming out of the restaurant. Only the most unconscious part of his mind saw Gaz following.

The weather outside Bloaty's was still chilled, still clouded, but the city's buildings at least blocked the wind. Above him the sky screamed whiteness that glared off of every window, making the severity of his headache spike like the readout from a heart monitor attached to an epileptic. Gaz's footsteps thumped behind as she ran to stop him on the way to the parking lot.

"Wait up, you idiot! Whatever you're getting ready to do is probably really stupid so you better calm the hell down and -"

She grabbed his shoulder. His skull imploded in on itself and then expanded a thousand times, supernova-style.

When he turned around his sister was gone. In her place was a creature with no lower jaw that salivated at him with a wobbly shake of its head. Jagged teeth hung down from a gaping, sucking mouth as the thing stepped toward him. It reached out with fingers like nails, and Dib knew somehow that if it touched him the pain would make him go mad.

He stumbled backward, feet tripping on the black and rocky ground. His stomach dropped as he nearly lost his balance, unable to watch himself as he locked his eyes on the drooling monster. Desperate for a weapon, he groped in the soil for a rock, a pipe, anything - and felt the earth burn his hand. It was beyond the heat of a hot summer day. His palm stung as if it had been dipped in acid. Dib rubbed his hand on his jeans, still backing away from the approaching _thing_ so desperate to grab him.

It lurched hungrily, with no movement an organic creature could imitate.

"Get the fuck away from me!" he yelled hoarsely, grabbing a handful of the poisoned dirt and heaving it at the thing's face. For an instant the Hunter howled in ecstasy within him, rejoicing at the strike. And then he watched in horrified fascination as sores began to open on the monster's skin. Small at first, then radiating angrily outward - necrosis in high-speed - until the creature's skin melted off like candle wax. The still-dripping skull beneath continued to leer at him as it breathed loudly.

All Dib could do was scream. Disgust and fear and emotions without names scraped themselves together in his stomach and erupted out of his mouth in an agonized wail. He fell to the ground, head pulled between his knees. The entirety of the world crushed in around him and forced all his being into a tiny pinprick that somehow still felt pain.

He inhaled as deeply as he could. With a small _pop_ that sounded from within his ear rather than outside of it, the sidewalk outside of Bloaty's snapped back into reality. Gaz was leaning over him, one hand reared back.

"Wait! Gaz! I'm back, it's okay!"

She made no sign that she'd heard him. Instead her open palm crashed against his cheek, rattling his glasses against the ground as his head twisted sideways. The crisp pain lurched his mind back to the gritty pavement, the smell of oil in the air, Gaz's form glaring down at him. Dib wondered for an instant or two why on earth he'd said "it's okay" because nothing could have been more senseless.

"What the shit was that about?" she asked, in a mix of rasping anger and shock.

"It was just...I just-"

"You had a damned fit. It was like a seizure on _Anomaly ER_. Too bad you didn't bite your tongue off." Gaz grabbed the front of his jacket and heaved him up with surprising strength.

He found his legs somewhere beneath him and stood shakily, avoiding Gaz's eyes. The melted monster still hovered threateningly in his mind and he was afraid that the slightest provocation would bring it back.

She shook her head exasperatedly at him, arms crossed across her chest.

"You don't have to go to the hospital, do you?"

"No. I don't think so. I think I just felt a little weak from the pizza smell," he lied unconvincingly.

In the moment of awkward silence, with Gaz's amber eyes resting on him fixatedly, Dib considered telling her everything. He considered admitting his visions, his skull-splitting migraines, the general feeling of slippage. Certainly he couldn't hope to hide it forever; Gaz was too smart for that. He was beginning to feel isolated and dangerous, walking around with the knowledge that he could black out at any moment. But some fear held him back - a fear of padded rooms and sleeping pills - and kept him silent. He'd tell her if things inside his head got worse, he promised himself.

There were more important things at stake right now, anyway. Things that hailed from planet Irk and had picked up a new hobby fileting Swollen Eyeball agents.

"I have to go to the labs" he said suddenly. The declaration surprised him nearly as much as it seemed to surprise Gaz. "I have to find Zim's tank and see if he's still there. This has all gone way too far. It's the only way I'll know for sure."

_Know. There's that word again. What makes you think you know anything, Dibshit?_

Dib shook his head, shaking the taunting words from his mind before they convinced him otherwise. This was no time to lose focus. He couldn't let his thoughts wander. The risk of dredging up the feelings of darker days and becoming lost in his own wallowing angst was too great. Action first. Brooding later.

He stomped over to the parking lot and started the car with such a single-minded concentration that Gaz's knocking on the window nearly sent him into spasms. Grimacing moodily as he struck the car horn by accident, she buckled herself in beside him.

"You said you were going to drop me off at home, remember?" she said, with over-emphasized patience.

"Right. Sorry. I have to head right back out again, though." Dib said aimlessly, as he kicked the car into reverse.

The drive back to the house was nearly silent. Gaz turned herself sideways and looked out the window, while Dib spent the entire trip trying to find a radio station that wasn't playing commercials. It wasn't until he'd parked on the road outside of their house and Gaz was halfway to the front door that he thought to call her back to the car's open window.

"Hey, Gaz?" he said, leaning out over the sill and resting his arm on the sun-warmed metal of the car door.

"Yeah?"

"I...I just think you should know - um -" he stammered stupidly and softly cursed his family's emotionally stunted regard for affection. Sure, he could talk for hours about the kind of algae that the Loch Ness Monster prefers, but telling his sister that he loved her as a psychotic alien ran amok was proving too difficult.

As usual, Gaz was one step ahead of him.

"I know. Me too. I guess." She said, as if tired of his stuttering.

"And can you do me a favor and keep a weapon with you? How about that bat you used to carry around?"

She crossed her arms over her chest. "The bat broke. I have a crowbar now."

"Sounds good. Better, actually. I'll try and be home…soon. I hope. Lock the doors."

"You want to remind me to brush my teeth, too? I got it, Dib. I'll see you later."

Gaz turned away from him, and walked back into the house. For probably longer than he needed to Dib watched the door, waiting for the click of the lock and the blinking of the T.V. through the window.

He finally shifted gears, backed up into the road, and set his destination firmly in his head: the Membrane Incorporated Research Center, Storage Basement C.

* * *

><p><em>I liked this chapter. Dunno why, really. The content of Zim's note is a reference to one of the (IMO) better Slenderman blogs, called "Just Another Fool." You can tell that the blogger is really starting to lose it when they post cryptic stuff.<em>

_On another note, you all might have to expect weekly-ish updates from now on. The end of the semester is fast approaching, and the chapters are getting longer and more complicated as we go, so they'll need a little more revising and I'll have a little less time to do it in. Don't worry, though – this stuff is my break from the unmagnificent lives of adults, so I'll keep at it if you will. Be sure to leave a review, if the mood strikes. _


	8. The Descent

_Okay, guys. Are you ready for some angst and exposition? Or as I like to call it, "angstposition"? You're not? Well…sorry, I guess. If you don't want to bother with that, you can just skip to the end, which is a rather good bit. I'll admit that part of my delay in posting this is that I wanted it to meet everyone's expectations, but some chapters are like brownie batter – the more you fiddle with them, the more you end up with brownies that are really tough and full of tunnels. I'm not so good at metaphors, okay?_

_Edit: I realized after I uploaded this that FFN didn't like the little dividers I'd added, so I had to re-upload this a few times. Sorry for weirdness. _

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 8 – The Descent<strong>

Dib spread his hand on the DNA scanner. Quivering apprehension far worse than the actual pain settled in him as he waited for the machine to pick a finger. A needle pricked the tip of his middle finger, drawing a quiet yelp from Dib as it jabbed beneath his sensitive, tooth-gnawed nail. The readout dinged happily at him, as though having his father's DNA was an accomplishment.

"Identity: Roger Membrane. Status: Approved for entry."

The door to the basement labs opened with a hissing _whoosh_, dampness escaping from the lower levels. As much as he resented that his father's chromosomes swam in his cells, Dib had to admit that there were certain benefits to being a clone. Like having access to the entirety of the Membrane Research Center.

Dib began his descent to the fourth underground floor, down into the darkness where what remained of Zim was preserved. Any leftover anger from his outburst at the restaurant had vanished like smoke, leaving only an empty, aching queasiness. The patient dread before an operation, the quiet grief of sitting down to an ill-prepared-for test, multiplied a thousand writhing times like a nest of snakes.

Here the air was stagnant, bitter - Dib felt the dust and bacteria so indicative of decay rattle around in his lungs as he breathed. The insulation was much poorer so far into the earth. Combined with the chill of refrigeration units, it was nearly as cold inside these labs as outdoors. Dib wrapped his arms around himself as he walked.

Doors passed by, lined up in perfect neatness with tiny windows revealing their inner secrets. All identical stainless-steel-and-plastic rectangles, save for the labels on each one.

"Robotic Weasel mRNA Synthesis"

"Super-duper Toast Molecular Crystallization Machine"

"Time-travelling Bacteriophage Incubation"

None of these interested him. They were just side projects, Ph.D. factories for his father to sign off on. He had three more floors to go before he accomplished his mission.

_Mission. That's a filthy word. Nothing good comes from missions._

For once Dib had to agree with his whispering subconscious. That savage Hunter that was curled quietly inside of him had a thing for missions, but the waking, black-haired teenager who kept it carefully caged did not. Nothing good had come from Zim's mission to conquer earth and nothing good had come from Dib's own mission to thwart him.

He'd mostly shoved his thoughts about the whole incident into a cardboard box in the basement of his mind - just as well hidden and difficult to access as the storage lab Dib was making his way toward. It had become exhausting to brood over. His outbursts and conniptions and paranoia had gotten nearly unmanageable after Zim was captured. For the better part of two years three different doctors had played kitchen with Dib's body chemistry, prescribing antidepressant after sedative after antipsychotic until he could work himself out. Or at least until he began sleeping on his own again.

Self-repression worked the best. Ignoring it every time it reared its ugly head. Distracting himself with research or television or his job whenever his throttled emotions emerged for a talk.

"You're not there if I don't see you," he'd think childishly, looking away from the slavering pink elephant in his brain the same way he'd resented so many adults for doing when he insisted that Zim was an alien.

The box was coming open as he walked. Every _thunk_ of his boots against the linoleum peeled off a piece of tape. The medicinal clean reek of disinfectant was taking a razorblade to the cardboard. Dib was beginning to realize he'd have to look inside if he wanted to face Zim in any vaguely-sane mental capacity.

Dib had hated Zim. Hated him with all the impotent rage that only a neurotic boy covered in the bruises of bullies' fists could imagine. It had been all-consuming, suffocating, to hate another being so completely.

And from that hatred the Hunter was born.

Staring across the cafeteria in Gradeskool at Zim's pathetic attempts to eat the school lunches, Dib remembered feeling the Hunter kick and scream with frustration as he resisted the urge to tackle the alien right then and there. _Here_ was the reason no one listened to him. _Here_ was the reason they would all be so damned sorry when he proved them wrong. _Here_ was the horror Dib was selflessly saving them from (in his head, anyway). Along the line Zim had become a symbol of everything that was unbearably wrong in his life. So destroying the alien was the only solution.

The fact that he was twelve-damned-years-old and had the perspective of a brain-damaged mole person had never occurred to him.

Perhaps a better-adjusted boy, one with friends or an attentive father, wouldn't have fallen so easily into the trap of hatred and obsession. But Dib had never been particularly well-adjusted. The rest of the world had shut him out, crammed him in lockers, water-boarded him in toilets, all while he tried so desperately to show them the error of their ways.

It had gotten a little maddening, being so ignored. Pointing at shadows, screaming without a mouth: that had been his life. Somewhere amidst the loneliness and frustration a dogmatic violence had gotten the better of him, one that cared far more for vindication than heroics.

Seventeen-year-old Dib was reaching the end of the hallway. He glanced nervously behind him as he opened the door to the stairwell, listening to the metallic _creak_ echo down into the darkness.

The clammy coldness of the lab only worsened as he stomped down the steps. Dib wasn't sure if his queasiness was caused by the shifting chemicals in the air or his own mental self-examination. A wet, wool blanket of foreboding was inching further over him as he relived the rivalry he and Zim had shared.

It wasn't uncommon that he would get tired or discouraged. Dib could only have so many people call him insane before he began to wonder about himself. The scientist in him watched failure after failure and insisted that he was mad to keep repeating the same attempts over and over again. Whenever things seemed at their darkest, whenever he and humanity seemed doomed, the Hunter would rear its head. It would knock his inner scientist out of the way and demand vengeance and blood and _pain_ for what Zim was putting him through. And Dib found that the Hunter's arguments were often convincing.

At the end of the day, it had more to do with being right than doing right.

Corny bullshit? Certainly. True? Absolutely. A minor difference that nearly put him in the nuthouse? Check-freaking-mate.

Dib had reached the fourth basement floor by now. The musty smell of dust had overridden much of the chemical tang from the upper levels. Low-energy bulbs provided only enough light to stumble by, and Dib found himself groping at the walls as he walked. His legs were getting all noodly as he approached Lab (-)4-R.

_Note to self: avoid excessive running right before an emotional baggage-claiming session._

The door didn't look any different. There was no neon sign announcing that Dib's greatest regret, his most feared trophy, was residing just beyond the reinforced laminate. He braced his feet squarely in front of the door. He found himself chewing at the flaked nail of his little finger on one hand with the other resting on the handle, trying to remember the last time he'd been down here as he worked up the courage to turn it.

* * *

><p>Capturing Zim had been an accident, really. There had been no <em>Independence Day<em>-style planning involved. Dib had just managed to kick Zim in the head during one of their particularly violent after-skool brawls. He hadn't woken up that day and said to himself "today is day that it ends." The end had just snuck up on him. Or, rather, the end had collapsed unconscious with a bootprint to the temple two blocks from his dad's laboratories.

Dib had used his DNA to get into the labs that day, too. Only he'd been dragging a knocked-out alien behind him at the time. Once he'd gotten Zim's disguise off, there weren't a lot of places left for the Irken to hide. Dib had even gotten to host his dad's show that night, when Professor Membrane revealed to the world that "my insane son's foreign friend is actually a horrible extraterrestrial!"

A week had gone by between turning Zim in and his biomedical examination. For seven days, Dib had ruled victorious. Photos of the alien (his alien!) were plastered on the news, every magazine, and eventually in a ghost-written book once Zim's base was torn apart at the hinges by government agents. Dib remembered being annoyed at how much Zim's plans for world domination were downplayed - no one seemed willing to acknowledge how close they had all come to destruction. No one congratulated him quite enough. The fact that Zim was, at the end of the day, just a single tiny alien going to seventh grade seemed to overrule all of Dib's insistence that his nemesis was an intergalactic Hitler.

Oh well, he'd resigned himself. A moment was all you could hope from perfection. He'd been _right_, hadn't he? Wasn't that all that mattered? Sure, international fame and recognition for discovering an alien was nice, but his personal battle was finally over. The Hunter glutted itself on his victory. Zim was captured, and Dib would be able to enjoy watching his enemy dismantled piece-by-piece. He'd even worn a tie to the special occasion.

Sitting between his father and sister in the front-row of the medical amphitheater had been awesome. There really wasn't any other word in his twelve-year-old mind for it. Years of work about to culminate in a bloodbath of vindication. Gaz kept getting annoyed at how he was standing up and leaning over the railing, trying to get the best possible view of Zim's spread-eagle form on the examination table below.

The doctor overseeing the operation had been very polite. He thanked everyone for coming in a mildly-British baritone and went cheerfully about this vivisection business as though it was a Sunday picnic. The juxtaposition between the doctor's narration and the horror itself reminded Dib of a demented nature documentary.

Zim had screamed. High-pitched and grating and punctuated with pure agony. Beyond physical pain, a tone that Dib expected only he could hear - it was a shriek of fear and failure. The Invader's eyes had widened and rolled in their sockets as all of his freakish organs were arranged around him. Pupils weren't necessary to watch the comprehension and sanity slip out of a being's eyes.

"I'm dreadfully sorry for the noise, ladies and gentlemen. My people are now working on silencing the creature," the doctor had said pleasantly, when Zim's shrieking evidently became bothersome. Dib didn't understand why it had taken everyone so long to realize how awful the sound was. How traumatic the hollering of such an arrogant and intelligent creature reduced to a science project. From the first un-anesthetized cry Dib had felt a strange, uneasy sickness. A sense of dread tapping at the door of his pride. Must have had something to do with the frequency of Zim's voice.

One of the assistants gagged him with a bandage. The muffled moaning was quieter, but being silenced just seemed to make the alien thrash around more with every scalpel taken to his green skin. Irkens bleed green. Every time a technician nicked an artery Dib would see a flash of viridian before someone would staunch the flow of blood, prolonging the ordeal even further.

Zim looked at him. Dib stared back, trying to convince himself that the would-be Invader was too delirious from pain to actually see him. The twenty feet between the examination table and the amphitheater railing became a few inches. Somewhere in the magenta eyes, beyond the haze of madness, a recognition shone. Zim glared at him through blood and gurgling viscera and Dib saw the silent message clear enough:

_You did this._

Dib's gleaming tower of ambition had come crashing down around him. The Hunter thumped him proudly on the back with bloodied hands. Some resigned part of his psyche realized that even this victory was failure. Dib had sold his soul for the sake of conquest, and this was his reward: a three-foot-tall alien torn into four pieces and the knowledge he was capable of damning a sentient being to death by torture for his own satisfaction.

Dib gazed into the abyss, and looked away in shame when it gazed back.

He remembered trying to leave the amphitheater. Being afraid of getting sick over the side of the banister. His father's black-gloved hand had grabbed Dib's arm as he tried to push past.

"Where are you going, son? They're just about to dissect the nervous system, which I'm sure you won't want to miss. Isn't this what you wanted?"

Professor Membrane didn't seem to find anything odd about bringing his children to watch Zim's evisceration. Dib slunk miserably back into his seat, leaning as far away from the railing as possible. He popped the collar of his jacket and tried vainly to cover his ears against the sound of Zim's whimpering. Dib's appreciation for the crime against nature going on below was his alone.

They hadn't killed him. Zim was much too valuable a specimen to euthanize. They investigated all his organs and then haphazardly replaced them like Legos in a box. Took a few that he didn't need or that could be imitated by machines. And then he'd been stored in the bowels of the Membrane laboratories in suspended animation until another question about aliens needed answering. At least, that's what Dib's father would later tell him - by then he'd begun his guilt-ridden insomnia and was knee-deep in a total mental breakdown.

It became the Professor's second full-time job to handle the analysis of Zim's anatomy and technology. Dib was too drugged on anti-psychotics to contribute too much beyond drooling on the couch beside Gaz as she played video games. That was about the time that his sister had started cooking and doing laundry, managing his medications and babysitting his half-lobotomized ass. Some big brother he'd been.

At least acting stoned all the time had calmed him enough that he stopped drawing the attention of the bullies at school. Dib had pulled himself together eventually - working out a system for shoving every ugly thought and disturbing image down into the deepest storeroom of his mind - until only his nightmares and nail-biting remained. At least they didn't medicate you for that.

His love of the paranormal never really slept, especially not when he'd received an offer for an internship from Agent Bill a couple of years later. Dib just tended to prefer cases with ghosts, or demons or poltergeists - things that were hard to dissect once they were found.

* * *

><p><em>Snap out of it, asshat. That's enough why-me self-pitying bullshit. None of your whining is going to get that door open any faster or get this whole case over with any sooner.<em>

Dib really wasn't sure why his abrupt inner monologue tended to sound like Gaz. Maybe his sister was just a schizophrenic hallucination herself - who the hell knew anymore? It was getting difficult for him to keep track of his life's non sequiturs. At any rate, the door needed to come open. He needed to move forward. If Zim was in there he'd turn himself into a psych ward on the way home. If the Irken was missing...well, that was a flaming tooth-pick bridge he'd have to cross when he came to it.

Squaring his shoulders in a show of mock confidence (despite the fact that he stood alone in the gloomy hallway), Dib reached out, turned the handle, and opened the door.

The darkened lab was surprisingly quiet. He didn't know what he'd expected - a carefully crafted torture chamber? A refrigerator full of alien guts? - but what Dib found was a single, isolated tank in the center of a small prep room. There were counters against the far wall, shelves of neatly labeled boxes, paper towels at home in their rolls. The whole place seemed so _normal_ for housing Zim's tortured, half-conscious remains.

_Normalcy is deceiving, Dibshit._

He crept around the tank, eyeing it from top to bottom. The part facing the door was opaque, likely to keep any specimen within from being blinded by the light of the hallway. What an asinine little kindness to have on a vivisected alien. The tank was cylindrical, with quarter-inch plastic walls and machinery at the top and bottom to monitor the living thing inside. The whole thing was full of some nutrient-rich pink goo; occasionally a bubble would froth to the few inches at the top free of liquid.

The clear half of the tank rotated slowly into view. Dib saw a lumpy shape floating in the center. His stomach seized and fell like a bird having a heart attack mid-flight. What had he seen in the forest? It couldn't have _all_ been his mind screwing with him, could it? Gaz had smelled the paper, seen the Irken writing...

Dib needed more proof than a shapeless blob floating in goo. He inched his way closer to the glass, unsure if the thing inside could see him. Pressing his face against the tank, carefully avoiding crushing his glasses, Dib looked inside for a chunk of green skin or a roving pink eye.

Instead he saw cyan and metal. The tiny robot waved a claw-like hand excitedly at him.

"Dib-human! Master said you might show up! You got you any bacon?"

GIR's high-pitched voice warbled through the thick liquid. Dib stared fixedly for a few seconds at the squirming robot that seemed to be dancing inside the tank. Some stuttering mix of anger and shock roiled within him, like writing a ten-page-paper and forgetting to save the document. He heaved his fists above his head and brought them crashing down onto the side of the tank with all the force his twisted muscles could bear.

The thing gave. Not even in the hairline-cracks-slowly-spreading-like-mold sort of way. Dib felt the plastic crumble beneath his knuckles as if it had been rotting for years, and in a bursting _whoosh_ the pink fluid dumped out into a quivering puddle on the floor.

GIR seemed ecstatic at his sudden violence. The little robot bounced out of the hole in the tank, stood squarely in front of Dib and started breakdancing.

"Where is Zim?" Dib demanded, unimpressed by GIR's performance. His antennae drooped sadly or a moment as GIR thought (for as much as he was able), and then perked up as he seemed to realize something.

"Zim's hangin' out at the Crazy House! He got a new friend over for dinner." GIR began sniffing at Dib's boots curiously. He felt the miniscule weight of the thing press down on his toes.

"The Crazy House? You got that ri-"

Dib stopped himself mid-sentence as realization choked him, studying GIR's curved, steely head and pronged fingers as he undid his shoelaces. The screaming-metal, tiny-footed ghost that Zita had mocked him with at school a thousand years ago rocketed to the forefront of his brain.

She and Torque must have heard Zim fumbling around on a different floor when they were making out in the abandoned asylum. The fact that they'd made it out of the place alive was certainly a much more impressive accomplishment than Torque taking the football team to state last semester.

Turning a decrepit mental institution into his new lair? Sounded very Zim. The Irken had taken up residence in quite a potent symbol of Dib's mental state, he had to admit.

"Since when you get so TALL?" GIR squeaked, snapping him back into the dark laboratory.

With a speed that surprised even him Dib bent down and snatched the robot's warm, metallic body. Amidst GIR's hysterical screaming Dib slammed him against the laboratory wall, one hand spread across the robot's chest as he held him still. All four of the springy limbs flailed uselessly against Dib's aching palm.

"Who does he have with him? Answer me!" he hissed, when GIR's panicked whimpering reached a fever pitch. GIR stared at him with pitiful, half-moon eyes that summoned no sympathy from Dib in his current mood.

"AaAaahHH! LEGGO!"

GIR began to emit sparks in his terrified fit - the prickling tickle was enough to make Dib release him. GIR collapsed into a clanging heap on the floor, his turquoise eyes flitting back and forth for a second or two. He threw his hands in the air in a poorly-timed imitation of the Wave, until Dib realized GIR was grasping for the stick-like communicator that had erupted from his back.

"Hey, you think I'm going to let you talk to Zim?" Dib snapped, boots grinding against the filthy linoleum for an instant before he launched himself towards the robot. He grappled at GIR's arms, sweaty fingers sliding off the slick metal, trying to hold the thing still.

GIR spasmed about in what looked something like a seizure before Dib saw the jets emerging from the robot's feet. He'd forgotten the little android could do that.

That was all the musing Dib managed on the subject. With a sputtering sound, as if the jetpack was clogged with fluid (or tuna, just as likely) GIR's thrusters ignited. GIR kicked violently back at him, releasing a scream of "CHURRO BLAST!" as a burst of flame erupted from his jetfeet.

The fire was more surprising than dangerous - but a flash of heat in his face was enough to knock Dib backwards. His fingers slipped off GIR's wrist and he narrowly avoided falling on his ass in the pile of broken plastic and pink amniotic imitation.

"MASTER! DIB IS HERE! HE ACTIN' ANGRY!" GIR screamed into his communicator. He hovered just below the ceiling, right out of Dib's reach - though he wasted plenty of calories (standing on his tiptoes, arms flailing like a moron) trying to grab the flying robot.

"Excellent! Try and distract him, GIR. I very nearly have the Dib-human's sister in captivity" came the grating voice from the communicator. And then in the background, muffled and angry:

"Get your fithly paws off me, Zim, before -" With a gasping choke, the second voice cut off.

An icy hand wrenched at Dib's intestines - clawing, twisting, summoning pain from nowhere and nausea in his gut. Zim's voice sounded tinny through the little speaker, but it was recognizable enough to settle dread in him as if he'd walked through a ghost. The alien was still alive. And he had Gaz.

Rage started to mingle sickeningly with Dib's fear at the sight of Zim's minion hovering six inches above him. There was some part of him that used to be fascinated by GIR's sophistication. That part sat silent.

Dib bent his body like a coiled spring and snapped into the air, grabbing GIR's communicator mid-stalk. He hurled the narrow pipe downward - GIR squealing excitedly in tow - and screamed into the microphone:

"Don't you _dare_ touch her. I swear to God Zim, I'm going to find you and -"

"Hahaha! Find me! I laugh at your PATHETIC joke, Dib-filth. I highly doubt you will be able to stop running away long enough to save your DISGUSTING littermate."

With a soft _click_ the transmission ended. Dib's grip on the stalk weakened as Zim's words started to seep into his overclocked brain. Without his notice GIR restarted his jetpack feet and the sudden pulse of fire was enough to make Dib release the communicator.

"DISTRACTIOOON!" GIR screeched. Giving no warning, the android kicked his thrusters into high gear, flame burning white hot from the soles of his feet. A tiny shockwave rippled through the lab, rattling delicate machinery and knocking an already-disoriented Dib nearly to his knees. GIR threw his arms out in front of him like Superman and rocketed out of the lab, screaming all the while.

By the time Dib pulled himself to his feet, GIR's manic giggling was fading down the hallway outside.

Dib sprinted pointlessly to the lab door, managing to catch a glimpse of red as GIR jetted into the stairwell. The little robot was gone, likely halfway across town to join his master by now. A master with a captive.

So this was the game. The spider had gotten tired of chasing its prey. This time it had carefully chosen some bait and waited. A clever plan. Very simple.

Except that the bait was his goddamned sister. Dib fought the images of Zim holding her down, tearing her open, cradling her head as they scrabbled for attention in his mind. The idea of the alien _touching_ her made his hands shake as a clammy coldness settled over him. Gaz wasn't supposed to be involved in this. It wasn't her battle, and it certainly wasn't her mistake. Dib leaned against the lab doorjam, eyes fixed on the tiled floor, and felt in some strange way that Zim had violated an unspoken law of war.

_You turned him in five years ago. Maybe he's just repaying the favor. Sister for a vivisection - sounds about even, I'd say. _

"You don't know what you're talking about" Dib snapped, listening to his voice echo sadly down the hallway. There was nothing even about taking Gaz. What did Zim know about family? About love? She was his little sister, and at the end of the day, Gaz was his to protect.

Dib didn't want to play Zim's game. He didn't want to face down the enemy who he'd undone and been undone by. The past few days had shown him the horror and inhumanity that Zim was capable of. But what else could he do? There wasn't another person on the planet who understood Zim the way he did. No one else was really his equal.

He had to try. He had to undo some small part of the destructive chain-reaction he'd begun in sixth grade, from the first moment he pointed at Zim across the classroom and screamed "ALIEN!"

This needed to end. He was going to finish it, once and for all - save his sister, save his sanity, save the world - or die trying.

_Geez, Gaz is right. You really _do_ have a savior complex. Alright, genius. Let the game begin. Again._

Dib scraped his boot on the floor, rubbing off any remaining sludge from the broken tank. He fixated for a second or two on dusting off his jacket, which by now reeked of smoke and gasoline from GIR's jetpack. Every muscle in his body tensed like a tightly-wound watch, ready to spring. With a rushing release of energy, Dib tore down the laboratory hallway and thundered back up the stairs, leaving the remnants of Zim's prison behind him.

* * *

><p><em>I guess the cast has been reunited, finally. Dib's really fooling himself if he thinks this is going to be a standard, "Bloaty's Pizza Hog"-esque rescue mission, though. We've got several more chapters to go, quite a few more loose ends to tie up, and they're all going to be quite the ride.<em>

_I've been staring at _this_ chapter for so long that I'm really not sure anymore if it's any good, so I'd love some feedback on it, if any of you all have the time. Otherwise, stay tuned for Chapter 9, coming up as soon as I finish these three essays and take an Evolution exam. _


	9. The Crazy House

_I apologize for the delay with getting this bit up. Life happens, you know the drill, and I really appreciate all of your well-wishes on my schoolwork. I took my Oral Exit Exam today, which is essentially when you sit in a room with three of your professors and they yell at you for an hour. But it's out of the way now, and I'm able to bring ya'll this._

_On the other hand, I want to say that I was just beyond thrilled with the response I got for Chapter 8 – seriously, you guys, I feel so touched to have you folks following along and enjoying something that I created. It really hits me right here. In the heart, that is. Not really any other organs so much._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 9: The Crazy House<strong>

The Crazy House for Boys had stood abandoned for about three years. Its forsaking had nothing to do with progress - no one had suddenly realized that keeping unstable children in cages until their brains turned to sludge was inhumane or ineffective. Budget cuts had done the place in, and now all the inmates had been merged with another asylum across town. Dib had read about it in the newspaper when Gaz tossed the article to him one day.

"Guess you'll have to find somewhere else to go after graduation," she'd said offhandedly. Dib didn't find the joke particularly funny at the time, but he'd been glad to know that the place was defunct.

Any of that relief was gone now. Dib gawked up at the looming building, eyes flitting between the rows of dimmed, broken windows and the halfheartedly bolted door a few feet in front of him. The sun was just grazing the horizon behind him, casting a blinding reflection on all the glass that remained. Glowing unearthly in twilight, the asylum almost seemed to be on fire.

No one had thought to take the sign down - the words "CRAZY HOUSE" screamed proudly at him through peeling paint from a billboard near the treeline. As if he needed reminding. His headache pounded softly as he stared at the sign, always present but mercifully subdued right now.

Dib was surprised by his own level of calm. He was surprised that the sight of the building wasn't making him ill (for several years after that unfortunate Halloween incident, he'd gotten lightheaded driving past the place. He still took serpentine routes through the city just to avoid it). There was no particularly acute sense of fear freezing his feet in place on the badly overgrown lawn.

Not to say that he'd forgotten the careless mockery of the psychiatrists, or the blood-fizzing panic that accompanied being strapped into a straitjacket. Not to say that he'd ever quite been able to separate the brutality of the asylum from the nightmarish flashes of other dimensions that he'd seen there. More that he'd perfected the art of pounding trauma into fun-sized packages at the bottom of his mind, where it was unlikely to derail him into hysterics.

Instead he felt a calm foreboding. A quiet dread. An understated and penetrating sense of _badness_. It did not cloud his thoughts or rattle his judgment, at least not that he could detect. Instead a softly focused shadow curled cat-like in the back of his mind, impossible to ignore but equally difficult to pinpoint.

_Just go in, find Gaz, and get out. Do what you have to do._

With all the square-jawed determination of a dog running into the street, Dib walked up to the double doors. The padlock on the doorknob wasn't particularly new or strong-looking, but _any_ padlock was certainly more trouble than _no_ padlock. Feeling very stupid for getting stopped so quickly, Dib wondered how it was that freaking Torque could get into the Crazy House just to make out with Zita and he was having trouble when his sister's life was at stake.

_Because Torque wouldn't take the front door, genius._

Good point. He shuffled through the undergrowth against the side of the building, looking for a low window or a trash can to lever himself up with. Finally he came across a half-broken tree on the eastern wall, with sturdy-looking branches that pointed neatly toward an already shattered window.

Wedging one boot into a crook in the tree's limbs, Dib hauled himself up. His scabbed hands scraped painfully against the tree bark, and he found it difficult to climb very fast or without nearly losing his balance. By the time he'd made it to the branch across from the window, the wounds on his palms flared red and threatened to open again. He rubbed the fine mist of blood off on his jeans.

Clinging carefully to the limb beneath him, Dib wriggled around until his feet faced the asylum wall. He inched himself close to the window, placing a boot on each corner of glass. The upper pane was missing but this one had to be cleared if he was going to slip his way in. Bending his knees and counting down from three, he snapped out his legs and kicked the window into the room beyond.

The tinkling of broken glass sounded as the window crashed onto the floor inside. Dib maneuvered himself delicately down through the opening, feet first, stomach rubbing uncomfortably against the branches as he tried to get more leverage. He let go of the tree the instant he felt one foot against the cheap ruddy carpet, which proved to be a very bad call.

Dib had underestimated his weight. Springing back against him, the branch righted itself before he could plant his feet on the floor. His feet kicked uselessly, he nicked his stomach against a shard of glass still remaining on the windowsill, and Dib landed on his back inside of the room with a spine-rattling _thunk_. The last part of his body to hit the ground was his head - occipital lobe first.

A hollow agony blossomed inside his skull as it cracked against the floor, dialing his headache up to eleven. Every part of the room shook violently. He couldn't focus his eyes well enough to get a good look at his surroundings - the wavering walls and shuttering corners seemed to move no matter how he watched them.

He tried to sit up but his body had stopped cooperating. His arms stayed locked by his sides, ignoring his brain's increasingly frantic orders to _move_, damn it. Dib wondered for a horrified moment if he'd been paralyzed. He pictured Gaz slowly bleeding out within walking distance of him, as he starved to death on the floor of a rotting asylum.

It took quite a sight to wrench Dib's morbid thoughts from him. That sight, as it turned out, was a strait-jacketed man crouching in the corner of the room.

The prisoner's rasping breath caught his attention and Dib tried to crane his neck to get a better look at him. Out of the bottom edge of his eye Dib could make out the patchy black hair, the white sleeves coated in filth. And the blood smeared around the man's mouth.

Dib's body was already rigid with the strange paralysis, but every tendon in his body seemed to wind tighter. His joints begged to give. Every second that his muscles contracted against his will was another second that the man in the corner leered down at him.

The prisoner was stirring now, stumbling awkwardly to his feet without the aid of his arms. Slurping blood as he moistened his lips with a pointed tongue. Dib tried hysterically to rationalize why there was a man in this room with him, his thoughts ricocheting incompletely like shattered bullets. They'd shut the place down, no one should be here, where the HELL were Zim and his sister?

Blood dripped down the man's chin like saliva. Dib felt it splatter loudly on his ankle, his exposed belly, his neck as the restrained inmate stood over him. The blood drops felt hot and slimy, but not near so much as the man's breath as he knelt at Dib's prostrate side. Crawling revulsion lashed inside his stomach. His bones screamed painfully at him for movement, but Dib couldn't even open his mouth to scream.

The man's teeth were pointed. He wriggled halfheartedly beneath the straitjacket, and Dib got the sick sense that the man would touch him if he could. Grab his paralyzed shoulders and sink the ragged, dirty nails into his skin. Dib wasn't sure if he was actually shaking or if the room was doing it for him. Somewhere in his gut parasites that fed on fear squirmed excitedly.

All of Dib's internal protests went ignored. He grimaced his eyes shut. If the man noticed Dib's twisted expression, he was certainly too focused on the teenager's throat to give any indication. The hot, metallic breath fell on Dib's neck and he waited, frozen, to feel teeth on his skin.

The room seemed to breathe. It heaved slowly and then fell into openness. And when Dib opened his eyes, the man was gone. No sign that he'd ever been there. Dib didn't hear him leave. The blood that he'd felt so clearly on his exposed ankle no longer itched him.

Dib's muscles relaxed into jelly around his bones. He kicked himself awkwardly onto his side, knees to his chest, eyes roving around the room for any indication that the vampire inmate had been real. These visions were getting more demented by the moment.

The others hadn't seemed quite so tangible. Quite so realistic. Once he'd gotten back to the real world he could look back on the flashes and acknowledge "yeah, that seemed a little odd." But this one had been seamless...and that gnawed horrifically at him. What else had he hallucinated? For how long? What percentage of the past two days had happened during blackouts inside of his head?

Dib realized that on some screwed-up level that he _wanted_ it to be real, if only so he could trust his own brain again. At the end of the day he had only his own thoughts to guide him - the physical world had become untrustworthy. Capable of fluctuations. There was nowhere else to retreat if his own mind turned on him.

_It doesn't matter. Well, okay, yes - it does matter. But all this started when you got involved in Zim's case, so we have to hope it will go away once this is finished. You got the rest of your life to beg antipsychotics out of a shrink._

Exhaustion was making Dib's blood feel like lead. No bed on earth could have felt as comfortable and inviting as the grungy floor he was curled up on. But he couldn't sleep now. There would be time to rest when he was dead.

Dib heaved himself to his feet, bracing against the wall for support. His muscles still felt weak and watery from the temporary paralysis, but some warmth was returning to him. Walking out into the hallway, Dib paused for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the darkness deeper in the building. The foul smell of the place still hung in the air, much like he'd remembered it; a paradoxical mix of antiseptic and excrement. Only a little dustier now.

Wisps of sunlight worked their way in at steady intervals down the hall, from rows of open doors like the one he'd just walked out of. These were the cells, he realized. The one he'd been kept in years ago was a little different - padded and padlocked - but this floor must have been for the less dangerous patients. Dib felt the corner of his mouth turn up humorlessly at the thought of being a "dangerous patient." Mostly he just seemed to be a danger to himself and the people he cared about.

He walked carefully past the open doors, glancing briefly in each one as he went. No patient remnants haunting corners, no monsters. Most bothersome, he found no chunks of alien machinery or abandoned taco boxes. No sign of Zim at all. Just carpets covered in stains and crumbled leaves and tiny rooms with walls scarred by fingernails and age. His ears strained against the creaking silence for Zim's maniacal laugher somewhere deep within the asylum. Only stillness.

The hallway ended in a T-shape. Dib stood uncertainly at the intersection, unsure of which direction to turn. Standing still sent a crawling uneasiness through him - the dual aggravations of restlessness and fear - and he started gnawing impulsively on his ring-finger nail. Every second he stood here stupidly was a second Gaz could be slipping away from him. Another second she might be in pain at the hands of that intergalactic psychopath.

A gurgling sound, not unlike water surging through pipes, sounded off to Dib's right. He snapped his head to the side, barely registering the sting at the tip of his finger where he'd torn off a sliver of skin. For the first time he noticed that the light leaking out of this hall of doorways was a little different. It was the cool starkness of fluorescence rather than the dusty warmth of sunlight.

Dib stepped carefully, inspecting each door as he passed it. The first three were tightly locked, and when Dib glanced into the little windows in the center of each one he saw only empty, dirt-caked corners. The fourth was jarred open a few inches, casting a clean wedge of light onto the floor. Dib opened it all the way with more curiosity than forethought.

This room was made of four cells, with the walls broken down in between like some half-assed home renovation. Dib nearly tripped over the stripped wires and coiled hoses that littered the floor, intertwining and disappearing snake-like into the walls. Even in exile Zim hadn't changed his taste in technology.

At first Dib thought that the place was filled with computer terminals. The air hummed with stagnant warmth and little lights seemed to blink from every corner. Bulbous sculptures of glass and steel and plastic were erected at intervals, with pipes blooming out of their tops like vines. Some were lunchbox-sized, others took up full corners from floor to ceiling.

Dib approached the smallest one and looked inside. It held organs in miniature, bobbing in fluid like ping-pong balls and Dib pulled himself away the instant that the grisly sight registered in his brain. None of the other containers were much better. Dib walked by doll-sized spinal columns that had been dried and labeled, little brains giving off pulses of electricity in their tanks, and a few more smears of gore that made his stomach lurch and his head dizzy.

In the farthest corner, suspended in a glass tube, was what looked like a hunk of meat. About the size of a pillow, the thing was veined and creviced all over like a brain. It pulsed spasmodically, five or six different tones of crimson and blue making up the lumpy surface. Wedged snugly in one of the bloody fissures was a single eye that blinked very slowly at Dib as he stared at it in gape-mouthed horror. This - whatever it was - was alive.

Just as he made this connection, he heard the thing moan. Very softly with a mouth that he couldn't see, but the hollow and creaking sound came clearly from the lump of gore as if he'd heard it outside the tank.

Twice in his life Dib had been turned inside out. Both times by Zim's doing, and only for a few seconds. It had been a crushing, suffocating agony. One that this former-human in the tank before him would never escape.

Dib looked for a panel on the side of the machine. Something with buttons and information outputs. With a bit of prying he found a collection of multi-colored switches on the top of the tank, as the eye nestled amongst viscera gazed, unfocused, at him. One of the buttons was bright red and set apart from the rest. Dib pressed it, hard, holding his finger down much longer than was probably necessary until the thing's quivering slowed to a stop.

What the purpose of this tiny torture chamber was, beyond making him feel nauseated and grimy, Dib didn't know. If he felt some small gratification at putting the gore-thing out of its misery, then it evaporated the instant that he stepped back into the corridor to continue his search for Gaz.

He redoubled his speed as he half-ran through the hallways, partly to help him shove thoughts of the things in the lab out of his mind. Every shadow his skinny form cast on the wall became a deformed experiment, every glint upon glass were Gaz's slowly dimming eyes.

And then he saw it. Them, really. Dib rounded another corner and saw that the matte-painted wall to his right was coated in black handprints. Most were smeared at the edges, dark and solid as if made with fingerpaints. They fell at different heights, different angles - some more faded than others. Dib spread his own hand on top of one and watched it disappear beneath his fingers.

The handprints belonged to children. At least a dozen of them. Imitation cave-paintings across the walls of an abandoned asylum.

The stomach-drop of a monster sighting rattled him as he studied the markings. There was no way of knowing how new they were - maybe some herd of disturbed kids had painted them ten years ago. Or maybe Zim had been lobbing the hands off of the nine-year-olds he was kidnapping.

He drew his hand away from the wall as if there was a fire on the other side. The handprints weren't all concentrated in a single space like buckshot – they ran down the length of the hall. Kids marking their way from lunch or to death, he had no idea.

Dib followed the marks, breath hooking in his throat. Now that he had some idea what state Gaz might be in when he found her, he found himself torn between running as quickly as possible and standing stock-still in fear. The appeal of ignorance was strong. He forced himself down the hall, to the left – to where the handprints disappeared behind the doorway of another little room.

This one had no window in the closed door. Dib yanked futilely at the locked doorknob for a precious thirty seconds or so. How were you supposed to knock a door down again? Foot to the lock, right?

That was what he tried. Bracing himself against the moldy floor, knees locked, Dib rammed the heel of his right combat boot as hard as he could at the lock of the door. He was rewarded with a spray of cheap plywood as the door gave way – probably they hadn't built the place expecting any of the inmates to have steel-toed shoes.

Dib allowed himself a second or two to feel proud of breaking the lock on his first shot. Then he heard the squeaking, muffled cry coming from inside of the room and nearly tore the door off by its other side as he burst in.

Sixteen years of insults tend not to lie – Dib would know Gaz's voice anywhere, and he could make out a few profanities from the white bundle huddled in the corner of the little cell. She'd been wrapped up in something eerily like spider web - but, of course, improved with Irken technology. The clumps of purple hair sticking out of the silvery strands reassured him – that and the flailing profanity, of course.

"It's okay, Gaz. I'm here. I just have to figure out how to deal with this...stuff." He said with exaggerated loudness, unsure if she could hear him under the white sheath. The stuff felt strange and cottony between his fingers and quickly grew spotted in red as he tore at it with his bleeding fingertips. It proved too tough for him to wrench apart. Gaz's kicking beneath the bundle was becoming more spastic and her muffled cries more urgent.

In a moment of panic he pulled a handful of threads loose and bit down as if he were trying to get a package of Cheez-poofs open. The fibers tasted metallic. He ground his teeth, feeling it come apart in his mouth and trying to keep his tongue as far away as possible. It wasn't until he'd worked his way through a few strands that something occurred to him.

This stuff was Irken. So it was sensitive to water.

Dib bit hard at his tongue, summoning a mouthful of saliva. He spat a gob into both of his hands, making a mental note never to tell Gaz how he'd freed her, and grabbed at the stuff. Dissolving like cotton candy between his palms, the silvery matting tore away in great fistfuls. Within seconds he could make out Gaz's dirty tee-shirt and roving brown eyes beneath.

A sort of tense relief washed over him at Gaz's vitality. Zim must not have hurt her. He hadn't been too slow or stupid getting here. Besides, he was desperate for some kind of company in this wretched building - he wasn't sure how much longer he could walk the hallways alone before he ran the risk of never coming back out again. Gaz was an ill-tempered rock he could cling to.

She clawed, thrashed, fought against her bindings with such violence that it actually got in his way as he tried to undo more of the fibers. The growling which had been somewhat subdued before reached a fever pitch, until he was finally obliged to reassure her -

"I'm going as fast as I can!" Dib pulled a clump of strands out of her face and she slapped bad-naturedly at his hand.

"No," she gasped, with a half-snarl that up until then he'd ascribed to her aggravation at being kidnapped. "You don't get it. It's a freaking trap, you moron."

Dib stared down at his half-freed sister. He felt the fetid, heavy silence of the air around them as the moment seemed to freeze. It was a trap. One he'd walked right into, blindly, his clouded mind too full of idealized heroics and desperation to predict otherwise.

"We might still have a chance," he said softly, glancing feverishly around the room as if he expected the walls to produce spikes and start closing in. "C'mon, get up - it's only a little ways to where I came in."

Gaz kicked off the remaining strands. "Dib, the only way we're getting out of here is if-"

She stopped short, eyes fixed somewhere behind him. White-rimmed irises shone with a fear he'd seen on her face only a handful of times. Dib pivoted his body, throwing himself defensively in front of her, boots squeaking against the ground as he looked for the threat.

He was so focused on the door and hallway beyond that the movement on the ceiling above him went unnoticed. Until a spindly, small-bodied monster crinkled into being two feet above them. The thing locked its silvery legs around his head with a violent swiftness, muffling any light or sound.

A hand grabbed his hair and wrenched from the roots. He felt the tingling coldness of metal against his temple. A flash of purple light that blinded the corners of his vision.

Followed quickly by pain.

The headache snapped Dib's skull. Drove a screwdriver through his ear and swirled it around. Every nerve ending was being yanked with tweezers. Dib tried to breathe but the pain seized at his chest and forced air from his lungs. He couldn't hide. There was no room in even the farthest reaches of his mind to think of anything other than the screaming agony that tore at his body. It broke him into a thousand pieces and fused him back together only to take a shotgun to his head again, ad infinitum until nothing remained but suffering.

He was going to die. He felt sure of it. No one could feel this sort of pain and live. Dib would gladly take death, beg for it, if he had the capacity for words any longer.

The darkness was the greatest mercy he had ever known.

* * *

><p><em>Sorry for that bit of cliffhanger – it's just how these things work out, sometimes. I'm hoping to get the next chapter up a bit sooner than this one. I felt like this chapter was a bit dull and bridge-y, especially following "The Descent," but that's mostly so that we can have a breather before the climax gets going. Also I don't like how the title of this one is "the Crazy House" because I feel like that's too similar to the title of Chapter 4, but I'm too tired to think of anything much different ATM. Anyway, thanks for reading! You're all beautiful and amazing people! And any reviews would be great :)<em>


	10. The Void

_Here we go with Chapter 10! I'm glad you all made it through the last section – hopefully this one will be a tad more interesting. Also, if you left a review and I didn't personally respond to it, I'm sorry for my negligence – time's a little tight around here and I'm a bit scatterbrained. Just know that I love every single review I've gotten like my own wormbaby._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 10: The Void<strong>

There are a few ways to regain consciousness. You can be thrust, snapped, shaken awake with a sudden and violent fury. This sort of waking jars the mind as if had been struck with a battering ram and throws thoughts into a meaningless jumble, difficult to sort out again.

Failing that, there are slower ways of coming to. For example, the kind that begins far back in the medulla. You are breathing, it says. Your heart beats, it says. A conveyer belt of memories from the first sentient thought are brought to the forefront with agonizing slowness, and the waker must wait patiently to be brought to speed.

Dib's awakening fell somewhere between these.

For a long time he forgot that he had a body. His thoughts were the only thing that existed, floating in and out of his mind like garbage in the surf. Slowly, he found his fingers. He felt them twitch at the end of his arms which ached softly as if he'd been holding up a pair of binoculars for too long. His toes curled against his feet and it bothered him how small and fused the bones were.

Dib tried to kick. He touched nothing. Instead he felt a bubbly sliminess against his skin as he moved. Before long the dampness became background noise and he found he couldn't feel that, either.

He opened and closed his eyes several times before realizing there was nothing to see. A void of black stretched out in all directions (or it could have only been a few feet - there was no light or color to help him reference).

_Nice going, genius. Looks like you're dead_.

Somehow this didn't seem quite right. He couldn't be dead. Dib felt around with half-numb fingers until he touched his face, found the metallic hinge on the side of his glasses. He rubbed at the zipper on the top of his collar. Probably any sort of afterlife wouldn't let him keep his clothes.

Besides, he could still hear his heart beating. The rhythmic _thump_ was the only sound that penetrated his total darkness. Did it count as a sound if he heard it reverberating inside his head? Either way, your heart didn't beat when you were dead. Didn't have to be a rocket surgeon to know that.

_Fine. You've gone insane, then. Because this place doesn't make any freaking sense._

Dib wrapped around this explanation a little more readily. He realized it was a point of absolute rock-bottom when he felt comfortable with his own unraveling mind. Maybe this place was just a holding pen for his consciousness until his higher senses could sort things out. Maybe Gaz's kidnapping and Zim's revenge had made him go catatonic...

Gaz! How could he have forgotten about her! Zim could be torturing his sister _right now_ and all he could do was ponder his sanity? He thrashed about in the vacuum, mostly in an attempt to find some physical outlet for his burning guilt at letting Gaz slip from his mind. After all, there didn't seem to be any escaping from this place. When his flailing amounted to nothing Dib curled in on himself, brooding over his failed rescue and current uselessness.

He rolled ideas around idly like a bored child with a ball. There were times when he would have fought the Shadowhog again just for a moment of quiet calmness in which to think, but he soon found that his thoughts screamed overbearingly without any stimuli to distract him.

The nothingness began to creep in, barely noticeable. His fingers went numb with nothing to touch. His ears rung and then buzzed and then felt clogged with cotton in the silence. It became pointless to move his eyes at all because there was only blackness, and after a while he had to concentrate to figure out if they were open or not. Dib lost track of his body, until he was just a mind in the void.

The void was a frightening place.

At first it was just memories. Things Dib hadn't thought about in years came bubbling to the surface and he relived every second with vibrant detail.

He remembered being six years old and staying home sick with Gaz. They were curled up under a blanket together while Mysterious Mysteries blared on the T.V. Holding a tissue up to his little sister's nose, he told her sternly to "blow!" and was rewarded with a damp handful of snot. He threw the tissue onto the coffee table where it bolstered the already considerable pile.

He remembered being nine, and falling off the roof while trying to follow a UFO with his binoculars. Professor Membrane had found him crumpled on the lawn. Being carried gently back into the house, Dib had been surprised at how fast and thunderous his father's heartbeat sounded as he leaned his head against his chest. The doctors shaved his head to work on the concussion, and for weeks afterward he'd panicked whenever he looked in a mirror and didn't see the scythe of black hair waving above his forehead.

He remembered being twelve, two weeks after receiving his medal for exposing Zim's world domination plot and two days after Gretchen got her braces off. Kicking around on the playground, still sore and ill and distracted by the whole saving-the-world business, Dib hadn't seen her approach him on the swings.

"Dib, I really like you a lot," she'd said.

"...thanks?" He'd tried, not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe Gretchen had anticipated his confusion, because she leaned over and kissed him on the temple. He still thought she looked pretty cute when she put her hair down.

Eventually Dib ran out of memories. Either that, or re-watching Zim be cut to pieces and re-discovering the fileted body in the woods was too much for his fragile mind. With no more raw material to work with, his brain had to start making things up.

He flew Tak's ship through the Andromeda galaxy. He lived in a cottage by Loch Ness. He battled his way across a post-apocalyptic desert, fighting dinosaurs all the way. Dib lived a thousand lifetimes while curled up in the fetal position in a cell devoid of stimuli.

It became harder and hard to separate one idea from another. Thoughts came and went too fast for his mind to follow, hours upon hours (or so it seemed). Not a single one stayed for more than a second or two before spiraling into nothingness and being replaced. Each thought became everything, defining the entirety of his existence, but they slipped through his clawing mental fingers and left him abandoned and alone and nothing.

His brain would have gone to sewage if it had lasted much longer. Neurons firing like gunshot until too much heat and too little ammo rattled them into atrophy. Dib was fortunate to be interrupted.

_Well, not that fortunate._

Light entered into his prison. It scorched his eyes; the first sunrise across a primordial sea. The fabric of space and time began to stretch around him, faster and faster into a great cascade as if he were running through a waterfall. The void slid away with a scraping agony. It was what he imagined birth must be like. And then he was coughing and sputtering in a puddle of fluid on the floor.

Dib tried to pull himself up, but his body was too heavy. Gravity felt like stones pressing on each of his joints. The world was nothing but sounds too deafening to make out and lights that he was sure would blind him. He wanted to go back to the darkness, back to the nothing that was at least safe and quiet. It might have been insanity, but it wasn't pain.

"Wake up, filthbeast! I have spent quite enough time waiting."

The voice crunched against his eardrums. A voice Dib hadn't heard so close in over five years - barring his nightmares, of course. The Hunter screamed at him and he managed to roll himself over onto his back, opening his eyes to face the enemy that had been crafted by the universe especially for him.

Zim was crouched over him. His four biomechanical legs crinkled stiffly beneath, holding the tiny alien right at Dib's eye level. The Irken wasn't unchanged - there was a jagged scar where his left eye had been shoddily excised, and the one that remained glowed with a dusty, muted pink. His pale green skin bore pockmarks from countless needle-jabs and biopsies. Instead of the pink tunic he used to wear, Zim had wrapped himself in the ragged remains of a thin brown coat, likely stolen off of one of his victims. One of his antenna had been torn clean off, while the other seemed to have been stripped halfway like a wire.

To an untrained eye Zim looked damaged. Dib knew better. He saw how the smug grimace on Zim's craggy mouth clashed with the seething hatred in the Irken's intense magenta eye. It was an expression that foreshadowed destruction and ruin, all focused on Dib as he inched himself millimeter by millimeter away on the damp floor. The alien followed his every motion, always above him, legs shifting ever so slightly so that his quarry was never more than a few inches away.

Dib could have reached up and struck Zim across the face if he'd had the strength for it. Instead he coughed up a mouthful of liquid and finally sputtered out:

"Where's Gaz?" his words sounded anemic.

"Aha! The Dib can speak! I had some concern that the isolation chamber would have rotted his INFERIOR brain," the alien shrieked, throwing spittle in Dib's face and predictably ignoring his question. Insults Dib could deal with - even his father thought he was insane - but Zim's green insectoid body so close to him proved maddening.

"Get out of my face. I can hear you fine, you lunatic. Now where is Gaz?" Dib repeated, his voice a little stronger now. The warmth seemed to be slowly returning to his muscles, but he tried to stay low and still so that Zim wouldn't realize it.

"Your sibling is being detained. Do not worry - I wouldn't dream of letting her expire without you here to witness it, pigdog." Zim quivered almost gleefully from atop his steel stilts, wallowing in the slack-jawed expression of disgust Dib felt creeping across his face.

_Nice going, Membrane. You couldn't keep her safe and now Zim's going to torture both of you to death. Dad should have made your middle name "Screwup."_

"Shut it! This is your fault just as much as mine," Dib hissed softly. He was in enough trouble without his inner monologue reminding him. Gaz was in enough trouble.

"My fault? NONE OF THIS IS ZIM'S FAULT." With a blurring lurch of motion, Zim leaned forward on his Pak legs and slapped Dib full-on across the face. Three tiny claws raked furrows on his cheek. "This is all because of YOUR VILE SCHEMING. It was you who sabotaged the mission, Dib! It was you who had me gutted like a Gungan on Feasting Day! Any misery that may befall you on my behalf is simply a result of your own treachery!"

Dib probably should have listened to Zim's screaming. He probably should have been bothered by the blood dribbling down his face. Instead he only noticed that the force of the strike was so great that it dislodged something from Zim's sleeve which fell clattering to the ground.

One magenta and two amber eyes locked simultaneously on the little object, in the first motion of unity that Dib could remember. He was closer to the ground and managed to snatch it before Zim - though the Irken's effort seemed admittedly half-hearted. Opening his fist, Dib stared down at a computer chip about the size of a postage stamp. The chip was coated in something sticky and grey that left chunks of itself on his fingers.

"What is this?" Dib demanded.

Zim threw his head back and laughed coldly at the question, fists clenched, jagged teeth shaking in the malformed skull. His laugh came so loud and sudden that Dib spasmed childishly at the sound, only summoning more mirthless giggles from the alien.

"You are in no place to ask questions. Whatever knowledge you have gained of my plan is purely by Zim's own-"

"We took it outta your brain!" the high-pitched drawl snapped Zim's rant cleanly in two. Dib twisted to see where GIR's voice was coming from, for the first time breaking his focused from the alien crouched over him.

The room looked to have been created - it was much larger than any of the individual cells, and broken-off floors jutted from the walls as if Zim had vaporized four small rooms to create a new, larger one. They were still in the Crazy House, at least. Great coiling wires and robotic hoses were draped over three-quarters of the decayed surfaces, running in and out of the room through holes in the walls and half-open doors.

GIR had propped himself up against a radiator a few feet away from them. With mechanical efficiency, Zim pivoted on a Pak leg and backhanded the little android across his metallic face. Dib wasn't sure if robots could feel pain, but something about GIR's shuddered writhing on the ground indicated that he hadn't liked it.

"What the hell is he talking about? Where did this come from?" Dib tightened his grip around the chip, feeling the sharp corners dig into his palms and enjoying the soft crackle of the plastic. Something to cling to in this place where there seemed to be only danger and destruction.

Zim turned his attention back to the teenager curled beneath him, stalks clicking against the floor, his real arms crossed smugly across his chest. Dib realized that the alien was _proud_ of something.

"I installed that tracking device in your cortex. I knew you would try to come after me and I wanted to make sure I could keep tabs on you, Dib-filth. It is no wonder that your species survives so poorly away from the coddling of civilization - that state of 'sleep' leaves humans extremely vulnerable." Zim said, lips curled back in some toothy mockery of a grin.

For a moment Dib convinced himself that Zim was lying. He ran one hand through his hair, feeling his temples, trying to find an incision or scab marking where something might have been implanted. Of course, Zim hadn't made an incision on anybody six years ago, when he'd spent a day stealing and replacing the organs of their schoolmates. No reason to think he'd leave a mark now.

For an instant his mind flew to the video saved at home at his computer, a thousand miles away, showing the figure standing over him as he slept. The flash of purple light. That must have been when Zim had done it.

Dib looked down at the chip, gummed up with pieces of brown-grey goo that could have only been bits brain and blood. _His_ brain and blood. The chip in his hand was ground to powder as he clenched his fist around it, blood leaking from his ragged fingernails.

There had been a piece of alien technology _inside of him_. _In his brain_. The thought of it flailed sickly in his stomach - a damp, writhing coldness - Dib half wanted to throw up in the vague hope that it would eliminate this sense of contamination. He'd carried a piece of Zim's machinery around with him like a parasite.

A piece of machinery that tracked him. This violation seemed almost as demented as the chip itself. It suddenly made perfect sense how the stalking figure seemed to always find him, but this knowledge brought him only a sick unease. Zim had been watching him with the voyeurism of a spider picking the next insect to disembowel and devour.

Dib gaped up at Zim, feeling the pain in his head slowly subside into a half-soothing clearness. His eyes narrowed in realization.

"This thing," Dib said softly, glaring down at his fist "it made me hallucinate. I thought I was going crazy. You were behind all of those visions, weren't you?"

"I cannot be held responsible for any mental aberrations from which you may have already been suffering. But if the chip caused some disturbances...then that is a side-effect I would not have interfered with." Zim hissed smugly, evidently enjoying Dib's traumatized shaking on the ground.

Whether he imagined it or not, his thoughts seemed to be coming a little smoother now - like getting a new prescription for his glasses. He never realized how bad off he was before until he saw things a little sharper.

The _snap_ of understanding had passed. In its place was a hot-white mass of anger.

All that horror that he was losing himself again, that surreal detachment that he'd fought so hard against - it had been fabricated. The result of a tiny computer sending electrical signals in his frontal lobe. On some level he knew he should be more relieved. More satisfied that he wasn't schizophrenic and that none of his fears of medications or lobotomies would become reality.

Instead he hated Zim for making him doubt himself. He hated that fear and disorientation had been distracting his focus from the most dangerous and significant case of his life. If he'd been a little clearer of mind, maybe Gaz wouldn't be missing right now. And that, maybe more than anything else, mixed rage and adrenaline in his veins with all the carelessness of a child making a volcano in science class.

"You _psychopath!"_

Neither of them expected his speed. Muscles snapping like springs, Dib leapt to his feet, shoving aside the vague lightheadedness as blood shifted in his body. His fingers clawed at the air, desperate for something to grab and _strangle_. Zim - kidnapper of sisters, murderer of children, bringer of insanity - was standing here before him, and only now he thought to fight? The Hunter laughed condescendingly at Dib's tardiness, and then urged him on.

With a rasping snarl Dib threw himself at the alien, boots squeaking against the floor as he launched himself forward. He didn't care anymore about talking, about explanations or justifications - the part of his mind usually reserved for philosophizing had been high jacked by a righteous focus on Zim's scraggy, dodging body.

Dib hadn't waited for an opening - the beginner's error was on him. He stumbled at first, made half-assed punches and swipes that grazed Zim's uniform or were knocked cruelly away by a snapping tentacle. It wasn't until his third or fourth missed blow that he realized Zim was grinning at him.

"You think this is funny?" Dib panted. "Are you making fun of me? Fight me like a man, Zim!" Blood was trickling down his busted knuckles and he sucked at one of the stinging cuts, the metallic taste only spurring on his aggression.

"There is no notion which disgusts me more than imitating a filthy man-animal such as yourself! I will not be commanded by any beast too cowardly to finish off his own enemies," Zim roared in return.

The jab rattled Dib to the core. Zim had a point - he'd been quite a coward five years ago. But he'd not needed to protect his sister then. Or his life, really, for that matter.

GIR squealed excitedly from the sidelines at the sight of their grappling. Whether the robot realized the stakes in this fight, Dib had no idea. But he was thankful for the high-pitch screech, which robbed Zim's attention for an instant. Dib took it. He swung at Zim again - unwilling to be satisfied with another miss.

Zim tried to scuttle out of the way, but Dib's long reach served him well as he managed to sink his fingers into Zim's shoulder. What he lacked in nails he made up for in sheer force. The Irken was light - still as small as he'd been in sixth grade - and Dib twisted him to the side trying to knock Zim off balance.

Beneath his grip Zim's arm crunched like plastic, but there was no grimace on the green face. Instead Zim's robot legs scuttled madly against the floor, single eye slit in concentration as he righted himself against Dib's attempt to upend him. Despite Zim's haggard appearance, there was nothing weak or unprepared about him - Dib realized this when Zim suddenly folded his legs beneath him, crouched close to the ground. Dib's weight shifted forward. He felt his stomach shoot to his feet as all the force he'd been putting on Zim's shoulder had nowhere to go but down.

He caught his balance, barely, staggering awkwardly a few inches away from a faceplant. Zim was there when he pulled himself back up, more prepared this time and so close that Dib could make out the pointed tips of the scar across his eye socket. It looked tight and badly-healed; it was a wonder to him that Irken's couldn't regrow eyes, as insect-like as they were. Maybe he could and the scientists just kept removing one eye after another - the thought settled with a sick, unexpected brutality in his mind.

The instant passed, and Dib paid dearly for his idle thinking. Zim's three-fingered hand closed tightly around a handful of Dib's hair, claws scraping his skull, wrenching his head to one side as the failed invader screamed in his face.

"You dare not attack an Irken in his own base! It is I, Zim, who decides who lives and dies in this place, Dib. It is I who decides how many days your death will be drawn out over. I may not have conquered your world, but I am master over all who enter here!"

Zim's hot breath fogged Dib's glasses, made him dizzy with anger and excitement that rocketed through his veins.

"I'm not scared of your stupid threats! I brought you down once, and I'll do it again," Dib snapped, feeling a slight sense of accomplishment when his saliva burned tiny craters on Zim's pale green face. With the force of a hydraulic piston and the fervor of a tortured teenager, Dib pulled back his fist and rammed it into Zim's fleshy midsection. He half-expected sticky viscera to come tumbling out like a piñata.

Zim curled around his fist at the strike, clawing at Dib's sleeve. In a smooth, cat-like motion, Zim sank his sharp fingers into Dib's arm, burrowing through jacket and tee-shirt to latch into the skin below. Six needles locked into his flesh. Backwards. A screaming bolt of pain shot to Dib's shoulder and he was so desperate to get Zim _off_ that he braced his feet against the floor and pulled away.

Even with Dib's eighty or so pounds on the alien, Zim still proved stronger. Dib's attempt to wrench himself away just sank Zim's claws deeper, peeling away a chunk or two of skin.

With a twisting _snap_, Pak legs whirring into overdrive, Zim hurled Dib to the ground by his arm. Dib realized about halfway through his fall that if he'd locked his knees he might have stayed up - but this was little comfort as his head banged sharply against the ground and Zim finally released him.

The blow to his skull jarred a few things loose - having a computer chip inserted and then removed probably did him no favors - and Dib lay in a stunned stupor on the ground. Flashing lights made most of his vision. By the time he reoriented himself, Zim was looming over him once again.

With four thundering smashes, four blows that pierced the linoleum beneath, Zim's biomechanical legs pinned Dib to the ground. One beneath each of his arms and one in the crook of each knee, holding him spread-eagle and perfectly still.

All of the adrenaline which had been serving Dib so well when he was fighting suddenly became a crippling vice. His breath came in panicked chokes, heart thrashing in his thin chest like a caged bird as Zim bore down on him.

"You've had your last victory, Dib. Things will only get more difficult the more you resist," he hissed.

"I'm different than you, Zim. I've got more to fight for than you ever had," Dib snarled, thinking about his sister, trapped and scared, somewhere in the compound. If he could just –

But Zim must have seen some shift in his face. Some facial tic had given him away. Twisting his head suddenly, Zim turned to GIR in the corner.

"GIR! I've had quite enough of this squabbling. The Dib must be taught that his fate is inevitable. Bring Gaz to me!"

"Yes, sir!" GIR saluted with a _clang_, evidently in a mood to be obedient today. Dib twisted on the floor, trying to see where GIR was going and coming from, but Zim held him down and growled unpleasantly at his wriggling. At length GIR's metallic stomping got quieter as he left them alone.

The pounding of Dib's heart was not getting any quieter - he was quite sure Zim must hear it. Every beat rattled his entire body against the floor like a seizure. Above him Zim had begun rubbing his grimy gloved fingers together, knuckles popping softly. Perverse excitement radiated off the alien in slimy globs that made Dib feel filthy by proximity.

"You're not gaining anything by doing this, you know. Even if you kill both of us, they'll still catch you. I don't know how the hell you got out of that tank, but they'll put you back in it and let you rot in the dark," Dib spat, his voice quavering embarrassingly around his panting.

Zim did not even look down at him. "There is no damage your earth officials can do to me that would be worse than failing an invasion. Your torturous destruction is my last request of this planet," he said, with a cold and even finality that Dib realized it was futile to argue against.

Any further debate was cut short as GIR's clanging footsteps grew incrementally louder. Every few stomps was accompanied by some loud feminine complaint - the robot had Gaz with him.

_Please, let her be in one piece. Don't let her be blind. Or unconscious. Or dismembered. If she's okay, we can work something out. Please please please._

For once Dib's thoughts and feelings moved in sync with one another. His eyes roved madly around the decrepit room, across machinery and blood stains and pizza boxes, looking anywhere for a blur of purple hair.

"Okie dokie, master. I gots one girl-monster, right here!" GIR said happily as he rejoined them. One claw-like hand gripped a strap of fabric like a leash, with Gaz strait-jacketed at the other end. Her feet were braced against the ground, no hint of fear or cowering in her posture, only a gentle, all-over quivering of anger.

"Stop _touching_ me!" Gaz's familiar snarl echoed around them, and Dib allowed himself a brief moment of relief at the sound of her voice. She was alright, at least for now.

Dib craned his neck trying to look her in the eye. "Don't worry, Gaz. Stay calm. I'm going to figure something -"

Without warning one of Zim's legs struck him into silence, the pointed tip raking across his chest. All the air in his body shot out with a painful gasp, leaving Dib coughing on the floor. It was just as well - he had no more ideas for saving them than he had ideas for an Elizabethan sonnet.

"Get to your feet, Dib. Given your predilection for observing the grotesque, I'd hate for you to miss this."

* * *

><p><em>I feel like this chapter is mostly about physical confrontations – fighting, that is – the next one is going to be a little more verbalemotional, I'm thinking. So, I dunno, if you were bummed by the lack of screaming, then Chapter 11 ought to fulfill that need a little more. Also I'll be the first to admit that the sensory deprivation chamber bit didn't serve a lot of plot purpose beyond being fun to write, but I hope it was at least an interesting little piece of Dib's psychology._

_Next week is exams for me, so I'm probably going to have to take off my fanfiction pants for a while. And by "a while" I mean like a week and a half, most likely, so don't worry too much if you're waiting for an update ^ ^ _

_Unrelated: the other day I accidentally called one of my guy friends "Dib" without even realizing it. There was this awkward "let's just get past the moment" pause and everything. I think maybe I've been writing too much (I've got a couple other stories besides this one floating around on my computer that I'll post whenever I finish them.)_


	11. The Truth

_See, you guys? I told you I would come back : ) Since Chapter 10 I've probably written something like 50 pages of essays, research papers, notes and take-home exams, followed by two straight days of sleeping and eating bagels. I'm all back together now, though, and ready to give you:_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 11: The Truth<strong>

Dib wasn't given much opportunity to let the Irken's foreboding words sink into him. The instant Zim crept away and he felt the weight disappear from his limbs, Dib scrambled unsteadily to his feet.

For a brief moment he considered trying to make a run for it - maybe he could pick Gaz up or drag her along behind him - but the knowledge of Zim's speed and brutality discouraged him. The alien would have to be incapacitated somehow for them to have any chance of escape...

From across the room Gaz was glaring levelly at him, with the distinctive twitching left eye that meant she was trying very hard to stay calm. GIR was chewing on the end of one of the straitjacket straps, tethering her in place - but Gaz held herself with the rigidity of a statue and it was difficult to imagine her trying to move at all. Dib tried to smile at her, feeling the corner of his mouth quirk up awkwardly in a way that felt painfully out of place.

"Do not waste your time with foolish attempts to reassure your sister, Dib." Zim stalked over to Gaz's side and Dib felt fear lock his body into place. "I must admit, however, that it is a shame for your species that I must terminate her. She seems to be of good breeding stock."

With three clawed fingers Zim grabbed almost playfully at Gaz's stomach. Her face contorted in something like terror and rage, mouth twisted in a grimace but eyes shining whitely. Between the pizza and the puberty Gaz had gotten a little hippy over the years. She did not take well to having it pointed out.

Dib did not take well to seeing an alien touch his sister.

"Don't you dare! GET OFF HER!" Within an instant Dib had covered the distance between them, locking his fingers around one of Zim's Pak legs just where it erupted from his back. He wrenched the little alien back with all his weight, away from Gaz, boots slipping against the ground as he tried to fight against the biomechanical strength.

To be honest Dib had nearly forgotten that Zim had normal limbs. Most of his focus was on the flailing steel spikes that loaned the alien all of his swiftness and weaponry. So, of course, all of Dib's attention was on Zim's stabbing spider legs when he suddenly felt a small, clawed fist colliding with the underside of his jaw.

Dib fell back, teeth jarred together awkwardly inside his head as he tried not to lose his balance. The room was passing in a downward blur, his arms flailed against the air like the wings of a brain-damaged bird. When smashing his face into the ground seemed its most imminent, something caught him.

Zim wrapped two of his spider legs tightly around Dib's torso, holding his arms rigid against his body and breathing gratingly down the back of the boy's neck. Tepid breath like a winter draft. For as thin as they were the stalks were strong. Dib's struggling only served to tighten Zim's grip around him until his ribs pressed against his lungs until he could scarcely breathe.

Dib panted in tiny, panicked gasps as the edges of his vision began to blur and darken. He lost track of what was going on in the world around him, only dimly heard as Zim dragged a wooden chair over from the corner with his free legs.

There was a part of Dib, exhausted and aching, that wanted very dearly to submit to the darkness spreading around him. To go somewhere away from this screaming hellish madness, even if that place was nothingness.

Out of the corner of his pinholed vision Dib saw a glimmer of violet hair. Gaz would be alone with an alien psychopath if he passed out now.

With a frayed energy Dib kept himself awake, every precious atom of oxygen slipping away by inches as Zim's Pak legs stayed locked around him. His fingers went numb, his legs disappeared, there was nowhere for his brain to hide...

And then with a _thump_ that Dib more heard than felt, Zim slammed his limp body onto a chair and released the metallic grip. Air rushed into Dib's lungs, making him lightheaded as his world expanded outward. He made a few half-assed attempts to move his leaded limbs, but Zim proved much faster. The failed invader was moving rapidly now, wrapping great coils of metal hosing around Dib before he could come totally to his senses.

Chilled steel pressed against his side where Zim had bound him securely to the creaky chair. It was better than being constricted by a pair of spidery Pak legs, but Dib felt a new sense of unease settle over him as he wriggled pointlessly in his seat.

He couldn't move anymore - couldn't distract Zim with a punch, couldn't grab Gaz and run - and the loss of this final scrap of freedom gnawed at him. His only choice now was to bear Zim's merciless retribution. Dib's fate scowled perversely down at him through a single glittering eye, antennae remnants twitching excitedly above the Irken's head.

"You try my patience, earth boy," Zim hissed. "But Invaders are born of patience. It was only that which allowed me to stay sane in that horrid dark tank, while I waited and planned my escape. It was difficult, gathering enough strength to overpower that technician when he dared venture so close. Of course, I learned a great deal from him about where humans feel pain most acutely."

Despite Zim's cryptic ranting, Dib still found his eyes wandering over the alien's shoulder to his sister leaned up against the far wall. For the first time since this ordeal had began, Gaz looked at him as well - her intense amber eyes making him vaguely uneasy - before staring down at her straitjacket.

She sunk very slowly to the ground, curled up into a ball on the floor (Dib panicked for an instant, thinking she'd passed out) and began contorting herself very deliberately. One of the straitjacket sleeves inched over the bottom of her foot, and Dib realized with a tiny burst of pride that Gaz was working her way out of her constraints.

"You dare to ignore ZIM! Look at me, human! Your sister is nothing! You are nothing! EVERY AGONY THAT I HAVE FELT ON YOUR BEHALF WILL BE PAID OVER A THOUSAND-FOLD!" Zim roared, flailing about in midair as his Pak legs supported him. The alien seethed with an anger that seemed to heat the very air around them, enraged that even tied up, completely at his mercy, Dib still had the free will to disregard him.

"You think I wanted for things to turn out that way? I was almost as crazy as you back then. It was wrong what happened to you, Zim. I'll admit that. I'll admit that I was too stupid or delusional to see past what I wanted right then to the bigger picture. It ended up ruining both of us," Dib said, slumping miserably into his chair.

He had to keep Zim distracted. If the alien realized that Gaz was trying to escape, they would both die. But if she was fast, and clever - as Dib knew she was - and he kept talking, a candlelight's worth of hope might remain for them.

"Ruined…both of us? What insanity is this! Tell me, Dib, I would love to hear exactly what inconveniences you endured while I was rotting in a bottle!" Zim barked, some demented sarcasm dripping at his voice.

"Oh, geez, I dunno, going half goddamned insane ought to count! You might not believe this, Zim, but I felt _bad_ about what happened to you. I felt bad that they cut you up. I still do. I felt bad enough that my dad had to keep me drugged up like an animal during all those years I should have been making friends." Dib leaned as far forward in the chair as he could, pushing against his bindings.

"HOW DARE YOU COMPARE MY SUFFERING TO YOURS!" Zim's screeching twanged Dib's eardrums, grating somewhere deep within his chest. "You left me with NOTHING to go back to, Dib. Is there a single cell in that IMMENSE skull of yours that is at all capable of understanding what that means? Do not plead with me about claims of meaningless teenage angst, about absentee fathers and frigid females. My base was destroyed. My mission in ruins. My Tallest incommunicable. It was only the pathetic security of your father's labs that allowed me to recover GIR.

"And through all of this, through every humiliation I tolerated, YOU did not suffer at all. You still stepped upon the dirt of your home planet, Dib. Your sister tended your wounds. You attended that asinine skool. How could I endure this indignity, knowing that the destroyer of an Invader lived a comfortable life, while I was doomed to madness and agony in a dark closet? HOW COULD I ENDURE IT, DIB?" Zim screamed, his face so close to Dib's that he could make out the tiny, popped veins in the Irken's remaining eye.

"I DON'T KNOW. Okay? I don't know. But if you're waiting around to hear me repent and beg for forgiveness, then you're out of luck, _space boy_. You're a menace, Zim. I might regret that things went down so messily, I regret that we didn't finish things on level ground like human beings. But I don't regret putting an end to your demented _mission_."

Dib spat his words, exhausting himself as he tried to keep his focus on Zim. A stray glance in her direction might tip Zim off to his sister's escape. From the corner of his eye he could make out Gaz working her way out of the straitjacket. She was nearly free now, stumbling to her feet, arms in front of her but still bound together by the buckled-together sleeves.

"All the better. I certainly don't regret putting an end to so many worthless humans in my attempts to get to you. Did you like my specimens, Dib? The children in the jars? It was most unpleasant trying to keep them still and quiet," Zim said softly, studying Dib's face for a reaction, his antenna twitching excitedly.

Dib felt a little lurch in his stomach at having the specimens in that messed-up lab a thousand years ago brought up again.

"Why _kids_?" he had to ask, despite the voice in his mind pleading with him that there was no good answer. "Why did you have to mess with kids? Do you have any idea how screwed up that is?"

"Because! Children of your species are naive! They are stupid! And once frightened, very easily controlled! Besides, Dib - don't pretend as if there was ever any love lost between you and your skoolmates. You know children are cruel and pitiless just as I do."

Dib pushed past Zim's words, forcing himself not to think. "That's not what I'm asking, you freak! If you wanted me, why didn't you just come get me? Why'd you need to torture so many people?"

"Can you imagine my disgrace if I got you all the way down here and didn't know the best way to inflict pain? The best way to keep you alive with severe nerve damage? Or how many brain parasites a human can tolerate? I needed to practice first, Dib-filth. Any scholar understands this." Zim spoke softly, evenly, deceptively sane.

"You still didn't need to practice on kids!" Dib pushed against his bindings, back aching as Zim glared smugly down at him. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm not ten anymore, Zim!"

The invader's face darkened, eyes twitching with rage as Dib hit a chord. "A MINOR MISCALCULATION! Besides, that Agent that your little club so helpfully sent after me proved the perfect adult specimen to hone my skills on. Just think, Dib. If it weren't for you, they'd all still be alive. Painless. Carrying out their mundane, pointless existences."

"This isn't my fault, Zim. You're the one who killed all those people! You're the one who wanted to take over the earth in the first place! It's not MY FAULT for trying to protect it!" Dib heard a gasp in his voice, desperate in his justifications.

"It is your fault! If you'd just left well enough alone so long ago, we could have avoided all of this," Zim snarled.

"Shut up!" Dib barked. "Stop acting like you're some...some karmic angel here to restore the proper order to the world by destroying me. You can't pawn all your horrible crimes against humanity off on me!"

He was dimly aware that this was just some mind-game, another of Zim's plans to further undo his mental state. That knowledge brought him little comfort, and he found that he was defending his innocence to himself as much as Zim. The guilt that had nearly driven him mad before was creeping back, sick and warm into the back of his brain. Zim was right. In some vague, messed up way, he was right.

None of them would be in their current state if not for Dib. He could justify his own suffering at the Irken's hands, but no one else's...certainly not Gaz.

In an instant of emotional stupidity, Dib looked passed Zim as his thoughts passed over his sister - he suddenly wanted very badly to see what she was doing. Gaz had crept almost noiselessly up behind the invader, her body tightly tensed like a cat's, evidently with the intention of strangling Zim with the sleeves of her straitjacket.

Zim's single eye roved over Dib's face. The magenta orb glittered, antennae standing bolt upright in realization. With a single glance Dib had doomed them both.

Pivoting on a spiked leg, Zim abandoned his focus on Dib and turned on Gaz, who stood hardly two feet from him. She gaped up at him, lost without the element of surprise and crippled with her still strapped-together sleeves. For a moment she hesitated. And then, with a roar-like battle cry, she threw herself bodily into Zim's delicate-looking form.

Gaz didn't need her hands to fight. She managed to knock Zim to the ground using only her weight, stomping her boots down on Zim's spider legs in an attempt to snap them in half.

Twisting around on top of him, Gaz held the sleeves out tight in front of her. A makeshift enough garrote, to be sure. She bore down on top of Zim, pressing the strap of fabric against his throat while the Irken rasped and struggled beneath her.

"GIR! APREHEND HER!" Zim screeched between gasps.

Dib felt his brief flurry of hope melt into a damp mass at the bottom of his stomach. He'd forgotten about the little robot, who up until now had been playing quietly in the corner with a few toys. With a burst of fire from his feet, GIR rocketed across the room to his master's aid, throwing Gaz off of Zim in a sweep of his metallic arms. Gaz moaned angrily, reduced to a slumped pile of violet hair and twisted canvas.

"Don't you touch me! Don't you fucking touch me! NOT AGAIN."

GIR was already on her. Gaz kicked against him, trying to thrash away, screaming until her voice cracked - but for all his incompetence GIR was still a robot, and he had no muscles to grow tired. There was a rattling of buckles, a handful of swears from Gaz, and soon her arms were strapped back around her as securely as before.

"Excellent, GIR," Zim said approvingly, rubbing his throat where Gaz had nearly throttled him. He the robot off of Gaz, much to GIR's disappointment. And with a single motion that was shocking in its sudden brutality, Zim knelt on his spider legs - grabbing Gaz roughly by the front of her jacket - and slammed her against the wall.

"Contrary to what your people seem to think, an Irken Elite is not a piece of meat to be butchered. However, if it is a piece of meat you want, Dib, then I am more than willing to provide you one. That is all your sister will be once I am finished with her," Zim called over his shoulder.

Beneath his grip Gaz was nearly hyperventilating as she tried to fight against her captor, hair sticking to her face, eyes crazed. With one real hand Zim grabbed a handful of her hair and held her head still.

Dib watched in gape-mouthed horror as Zim positioned one of his spiked legs over Gaz's temple. Not to kill her, Dib realized - Zim was going to lobotomize her. It was a sort of sick and horrific irony that Zim was adopting one of humanity's greatest atrocities. He was going to disconnect part of her brain, enough to make her senseless but not enough that she couldn't feel pain.

Whatever Zim had planned beyond that was more than Dib could comprehend - it was more than his sanity would allow him. He cast about in panicked fervor in his mind, desperate for anything he could do or say to slow the descent of Zim's spider leg.

But what was there? Everything that Dib had used to his advantage in the past was gone. He had no technology at his disposal, no more of the raging ambition or frustrated focus that had spurred him on when he was younger. He was tied down and couldn't fight, and Zim was hardly a being to be reasoned or argued with. Besides, Zim's only concern right now was inflicting suffering on the boy who'd wronged him.

And then Dib realized with a jarring clarity that he had only one thing of value left: himself.

"Wait! You can't do this, Zim. Just listen to me. Please." Dib heard the pleading in his voice, the quavering debasement. Maybe there was a better, stronger man inside of him that resented begging, but the Dib trying to protect his sister felt no such pride. What difference did a little shame make, at this point?

Zim half-turned, the point of his Pak leg still grazing Gaz's temple. "I find it very doubtful that you can concoct any argument which I will find convincing," he said disinterestedly.

Beneath his spiked limb Gaz thrashed wildly against her bindings, eyes angry and unfocused. Dib wasn't even sure if she was listening to them, but he spoke anyway.

"If you let her go - if you don't hurt Gaz - then I'll go quietly. I won't try to fight, I won't try to get away. You've got to admit that I'm pretty smart, and Gaz can be pretty difficult. If you do like I ask you won't have to deal with either of those problems. Gaz doesn't have anything to do with this. She doesn't deserve to get hurt for my mistakes. Please, Zim. Just let her go. You can do whatever you want to me after that."

Dib listened to his voice wavering softly in the room, which had become deafeningly silent. Even GIR seemed to have stopped his normal mewling to listen to Dib's offer, before going back to playing with something in the corner.

Gaz was the first to shatter their meditations. "Dib, you fucking MORON. Why would you say some stupid shit like that?" her voice was a snarl of anger that made Zim jump back a fraction of an inch. Every line of his sister's face was set on edge, her hazel eyes slit and glimmering dangerously.

If Zim was otherwise bothered by Gaz's sudden eruptive outburst, he gave no notice. He'd turned his back to her, in fact, staring at Dib with a strange, half-perplexed expression. The lack of a pupil in Zim's eye made it difficult to tell where exactly he was looking, but the creeping sensation Dib felt at the back of his neck tended not to lie.

"And if I accepted this..._bargain_, how do I know that your considerably more capable sister would not just wreak her vengeance on me later? She has certainly saved your sorry hide before," Zim said.

"I won't."

Gaz spoke to Zim, her voice flat and featureless. A stone monolith of simplicity and enigma. Both boys shifted their gaze to Dib's stoic, strait-jacketed sister. The idea that Gaz would rescue him had barely entered his mind - he just wanted her to get away, at this most hopeless point - but he was bothered by the finality of her statement.

"You won't? Gaz, you can't mean that. I know things look bad right now, but you can't-"

"No! I won't!" she screamed, suddenly, with a vehemence that seemed to irradiate the air around her. "Take him! I'm sick of spending all my time looking after him! If you want a specimen that doesn't do anything except have emotional breakdowns and talk out of his ass, then by all means - Dib's the one you want."

"W-what?" Dib stuttered out, gears grinding falteringly in his brain as he tried to ascribe a meaning to her words. A meaning that didn't rob every purpose from his meager existence.

"Maybe he'd finally be good at something as an experiment, because he's a goddamn failure at everything else. He's been screwing my life up from day one. I don't give a fuck what you do to him." She turned her face away from both of them, as if the issue was no longer her concern. A skool-yard quarrel between children.

He tried desperately to look into her eyes, to find some spark of regret or trickery, but she ignored his pleading gaze.

Dib had never really been under the illusion that Gaz was overwhelmed with affection for him. He knew that her attention was begrudging - but it was still _there_. Through so many years of stupid plans, complaints, scuffles, she had never abandoned him. Gaz was always stoically present, somewhere, and he'd come to see her reliability as an abstract form of love. After all, it was more than their father had done.

For her to forsake him now was unthinkable. He'd offered up his life for her. Fought through an asylum that terrified him, survived pain that nearly snapped his sanity, faced Zim - the sadistic embodiment of all his nightmares - all for the sake of keeping her safe. Gaz was the last thing he had left to care about. And his only tie to humanity thought him a load, a burden to be carried, something _worthless_.

His anger surprised him. It boiled out from behind some long-locked door, a burning energy that seethed and screamed for destruction. Not the righteous, heroic anger of before - there was no desire for justice here. This was the desperately hopeless wrath of a lost cause. Of the realization that all was nothing except for the heart that beat in his chest and the blood that crept down his fingers.

The bindings that pressed him against the chair became unbearable. Every hair disturbed or cell dislodged by the coils was agony. Even the air itself was suddenly thick and itchy, gumming in his lungs and stinging his eyes. His brain was going to fold in on itself into a delirious origami if he didn't _move_. This time he would have no brain probes to use as an excuse.

Dib kicked against the floor. The wires wore blisters on his arms as he fought, calling on some archaic energy that ignored decency and cared only for survival. His writhing just meant more contact with the aggravating cords that bound him. The feet of the wooden chair rattled noisily against the ground, jarred by Dib's redoubled efforts to thrash his way free.

Zim laughed coldly at him, seeming genuinely amused by his attempted escape. "What is this? Has your sister's cruelty caused some sort of fit? You can fight against those bindings all you want, Dib - Irken built-cables are indestructible!"

Zim was right. The coils were indestructible. But the inferior human chair was not.

With a final spasm, Dib kicked himself over onto his side - bringing the chair crashing down onto the ground with every bit of his weight to aid it. Years rotting in the drafty insane asylum hadn't done the wood any favors, and it disintegrated into splinters with the impact.

Dib breathed in sharply as the coils around him began to loosen, quickly shaking off his bindings and dislodging wood dust from his clothes. Perhaps on a different day his bones would have ached from the collision, or his skin stung from the slivers embedded at odd angles, but today Dib felt only pure adrenaline coursing through his battered body.

He cleared the distance between the chair and the wall at light speed. He saw Gaz's eyes widen in surprise, Zim beginning to snarl. And then Dib pulled back his fist and rammed it into Zim's face. Every muscle in his body contracted and released with an inhuman focus - all of Dib's confusion and guilt and disappointment and _rage_ crammed neatly into a single swing.

Dib felt a sickening rush of satisfaction as a spray of saliva erupted from the Irken's mouth and he collapsed in a mechanical heap on the floor. Momentum still going, body still screaming, Dib threw himself on Zim's squishy organic form. He heard the packing _wham _of his fists against Zim's exoskull, over and over, the single eye half dislodged and blood from several sources mingling on the floor.

Zim's Pak legs kicked feebly, needing a brain not blinded by pain to control them. Every strike made the steel tendrils spasm. It felt good, this destruction. It felt horrifyingly, eerily good. The Hunter was proud of him.

_That's right!_ It said. _Everyone else hates you, even your sister, but you can't punish all of them! So punish him!_

Dib felt something choke. His hands suddenly ached and he leaned back on his heels beside Zim's broken body. Some hot, sticky mass had settled itself in his stomach, blocking up his breathing, blurring his vision. He looked down at his fingers and saw that they were shaking violently even rested on his knees. His knuckles were busted open, green and crimson blood mixed together on his hot fingers.

All Dib could hear was the blood pounding in his ears, the rage within him calming like a receding tide and leaving shame and sickness behind. Was this what even ground felt like? Was this any better, giving in to his destructive urges like an animal?

It was too hard a question. Too much for Dib to handle right now, amidst this sweat and blood and his chest heaving for air. Later. Someday. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.

He forced his eyes away from his hands, looking over at Zim's crippled form. The little alien's chest was still for ten seconds. Twenty. Then he saw it rise very slowly and descend. Dib had no idea how he could breathe with a pounded-in face.

Zim's eye stayed closed. Unconscious. Just like old times.

* * *

><p><em>We're not out of the woods yet, kids. Stay tuned. Let me know how you liked this bit, if you're so moved. Otherwise, I hoped you enjoyed it : ) I'm going camping with a few buddies of mine for the next few days, so I'll probably be slow responding to any messages andor reviews, but just hang in there and I'll be back before you know it. I love you guys! 3_


	12. The Escape

**Chapter 12: The Escape**

There was no telling how long Zim would stay unconscious. Dib had gotten a few good hits in - straight-on and powerful - but Irkens tended to recover quickly. Dib turned away from his fallen enemy, uneasy at leaving his back exposed but aware that there was no other option. Gaz was still staggered against the wall and evidently unfazed by her brother's small victory. She glared up at him and her body stiffened as Dib approached her.

"What are you doing?" she barked, as he grabbed her shoulder.

"Shut up, Gaz." Snapping back at her with equal violence, he began undoing the buckles of her straitjacket. There was a time when he might have tried to help her pull the thing over her head. Now, instead, he yanked every strap free and stopped, letting Gaz work out the rest for herself.

A gasping squeak echoed suddenly around the room. Dib felt his whole body tense, ready for battle, as he turned on Zim's senseless form. The alien hadn't moved. From the far corner came another whimper; GIR seemed to have finally realized that his master had been knocked out.

"Master! You can't sleep now! We was going to get a tobaggan!" GIR hollered. The little robot broke into a sprint, heading for Zim's side with the toy he'd been playing with still gripped in one metal claw.

Dib wasn't about to see what would happen if GIR made it to his goal. He snatched the robot by the wrist mid-run, holding him up off the ground. There had to be a way to disable GIR - a switch on his back, a chip to remove, something...

GIR kicked about half-heartedly in the air, making soft swooshing noises with his mouth as he swung his toy around with the arm that Dib wasn't grasping tightly. Up close, Dib saw that it was a scale model of the Space Shuttle.

Just like the ones in Joby's living room.

"Where did you get this!" Dib managed to pry the Shuttle from GIR's hand, shaking it emphatically in front of the robot's teal eyes.

"Little boy on the ground floor. Master said he wouldn't need it anymore. It can go all the way into space, just like the squirrels, and then the big mean Martian zombies show up-" GIR rambled on incoherently, long after Dib had stopped listening to him.

Now was as good a time as any to do something stupid and heroic. What did he have to lose? Gaz had robbed any last dregs of self-worth from him, and Zim's accusations that this whole nightmare was his fault still rang truer than he liked. Maybe if he could find Joby and bring at least part of the kid back with him, Dib would have something to show for this torturous ordeal. Maybe he could still salvage some purpose from his scraped-bare life.

It was a vain and deluded hope. Perfectly suited to the boy.

GIR clattered to the ground as Dib released him. Wrapping his fingers tightly around the Space Shuttle toy, Dib half-turned to his sister, who by now had worked herself completely free of the straitjacket.

"There's a broken window on the East Wing of the second floor. You can climb through it onto a tree and get outside that way," he said curtly, heading toward the door without looking properly at her. It was all he could bear to be in the same room with Gaz, with her cold and shameless cruelty. Dib half feared that if he looked her in the eyes he'd get angry beyond stopping.

"Where are you going?" Gaz demanded.

"To finish this case."

"I'm coming with you."

"Fine."

It wasn't fine. Even with his shoulder to her he could feel Gaz scowling at him, her amber eyes (regrettably) like his searching for any sign of weakness, any other flaw to pick apart and throw in his face. Dib wanted badly to turn on her and scream. He wanted to demand to see her Certificate of Perfection, bring her attention to the bitchiness and selfishness and shallowness that she so proudly cultivated. All of which he had tolerated because he loved her and had imagined that she loved him too.

But Dib had not the time or energy for such a fight. It would come later. He felt the inevitability of it coil patiently within him like a starved snake.

From out of the corner of his eye he watched her approach GIR on the floor and snap the top of his head open with a well-placed tug on the android's antennae. She rooted around inside of GIR's skull before pulling out a crowbar far too big to have fit in the storage compartment.

"But who was phone?" GIR sobbed, tugging pitifully at the hem of Gaz's shirt. "Who? Was? Phone?"

With an unceremonious brutality she knocked GIR aside with the curved end of the crowbar, sending the little robot careening into a pile of cables. She walked over to Dib and jabbed him sharply in the ribs with the pointed end.

"Go," she said flatly.

"I am."

They slipped through the heavy doors, with one final glance to the still and drooling lump of alien in the center of the room.

Gaz followed him silently into the hallway, which was half-collapsed from the weight of steel coils and from walls half-torn-down as part of Zim's insane remodeling. Dib wondered vaguely where they all originated from - surely Zim didn't just run them across the asylum for his amusement?

Dib broke into a half-run, his footsteps slamming loudly on the floor as the rows of doors flashed by, desperate to put as much distance between himself and Zim as possible. Not that it would do him a great deal of good if the Irken woke up. Gaz's stride was much shorter than his; he heard her panting somewhere behind him as she tried to keep up but he felt no inclination to slow down for her.

The stairs proved simple to find. Most of the signs from when the Crazy House had been functional were still intact upon the scratched walls, pointing the way helpfully to the Electroshock Wing and the Art Room and the Experimental Brain Worm Testing Chamber. Before long they'd turned a corner and found a heavy door leading into an industrial stairwell.

The steps leading down to the first floor were caged in chain-link, undoubtedly to keep any suicidal inmates from throwing themselves off. Dib found the metallic clatter of their steps as they descended to be nerve-wracking; at every turn he expected to see Zim's gleaming biomechanical legs beside him. Instead there was only Gaz, who trailed a few feet behind him like a wraith.

They'd spent their childhood this way, he realized. Creeping around haunted graveyards, spying on Zim's bizarre green house, having stakeouts near ponds full of monsters.

It felt strange, to want her away from him so badly. With every step he was trying to put distance between he and Gaz as much as Zim. And always she caught up with him, refusing to be left behind, riling in Dib the same frustration that a tailgater might only magnified a thousand-fold.

Dib opened the door into the first-floor hallway, gazing down the lines of cells. For a second or two Dib stood frozen, nearly overwhelmed by the place and his uncertainty. Every primal instinct in him was screaming _Run! Get out!,_ and it took all of his focus to ignore them. Joby was here, somewhere, if he could only find him.

Most of the doors hung open at strange angles, and Dib ran past these without a second glance. From the few that had windows he could almost make out a clouded and moonlit sky beyond the glass, but the thought of a world outside of this asylum stretched his brain painfully. There were people out there, somewhere, living normal lives - but Dib believed this as concretely as he believed that the characters in comic books were real.

Finally, at the end of one of the twisted halls, they stumbled across a door that was shut and locked. Dib breathed heavily onto the tiny paneled window in the door, using the steam to wipe the glass clean with the edge of his shirt. There wasn't much light to work with, but the barred window across from him cast a pallid glow on a bundle of something huddled in one of the cell's corners.

He could hear Gaz breathing impatiently behind him.

"Give me your crowbar." Dib held out one hand, stupidly expecting her to comply.

"No goddamned way." Instead Gaz elbowed him roughly out of the way, half-kicking him in the shin until he moved aside. He watched sullenly from the middle of the hall as she rammed the pointed end of the crowbar into the doorjam, throwing all her weight against it to lever the door open.

Dib began gnawing on the nail of his right middle finger while Gaz was getting the door open, straining his ears for any sound of motion from the floor above them. That creaking - was it wooden panels moving beneath the spider-legs of an alien, or just the building settling around them?

Finally Gaz's forcing proved successful. The cell door swung open, pieces of broken wood falling to the ground in an arc on the floor where she'd broken the lock. Moving past her, avoiding eye contact, Dib rushed into the little room.

"No! I won't look at you anymore, I promise! Please, just leave me alone." The quivering ball in a Transformers tee-shirt squeaked and kicked. Joby covered his face, half-sobbing as he shrunk away so far into the corner that Dib almost feared he'd disappear.

The kid's reaction stopped Dib dead in his tracks, looming awkwardly over Joby as his whimpering grew steadily more hysteric. It seemed impossible to Dib that he'd been this small when he was ten years old. No child this size should ever have to be so frightened.

Dib crouched down a few feet away - keenly aware that time was of the essence, but unwilling to overwhelm Joby anymore. He pulled the Space Shuttle toy from his pocket.

"Hey, Joby." The boy held perfectly still at the sound of his name. "I'm Dib. Your mom sent me to look for you. I know this place is really scary, but if you come with me I think we can find a way out. Is this yours?" He held the toy out as some kind of pathetic offering.

Joby revealed an eye for the first time. Grey and shiny as it peaked out from between his fingers.

"Yeah." he said softly, reaching out and grasping one of the plastic wings with a sweaty and grimy hand. "You're not...you're not that monster."

"Heh. I guess I'm not." Dib felt his mouth twist into a smile that was nearly meaningless as he stood back up. Joby uncurled himself from the floor, taking Dib's hand as he offered it.

"Look, this is all really freaking heartwarming. But we've got to get going, Dibshit." From the hallway Gaz snarled at them, striking her crowbar pointedly against her palm.

And just as the last echo of her voice died away, there came a thundering crash from above them. The crumbled walls shook ever so slightly, and Joby squeezed Dib's hand reflexively. There was no more room in Dib's mind for shock or careful planning. His thoughts seemed to rearrange themselves automatically like Tetris blocks, finding the correct alignment without his help.

"Run," he whispered.

The three of them bolted from the little room, tearing down the hallway in the direction opposite the staircase. Joby did an impressive job of keeping up with them, never loosening his vice-grip on Dib's hand as they searched for a way out.

From the floor above came the sound of a bellowing scream, and in the tumbling rattle that followed Dib realized that he knew, somehow, that Zim had descended to the first floor. He could come stalking around any corner, any instant, and this time the alien would likely not be in the mood for torture games or speeches. His vengeance would be quick and violent.

Dib fought against the prickling chill that the noises rose on his skin, his legs nearly giving beneath him with each slamming step. Every cell in his body seemed to quake and jitter as they ran on through the halls in desperate search of a way out. Gaz's rasped panting behind him echoed his own, and when he glanced over his shoulder her hair was sticking erratically to her sweat-streaked face.

They turned a corner, Dib's eyes raking the hall for any aberration, any sign of escape. He saw one - twenty yards ahead of them, one of the doors was thrown open. Light beamed out from it like a beacon, clear and white and perfect. This was it. This had to be it. Their ticket to freedom.

"There!" he called unnecessarily.

The sound of stomping and rattling was growing louder, imminently close now. It didn't make any difference. They were nearly there, the light was growing brighter. Dib felt his lungs swell almost to bursting within his chest in a strange mixture of relief and anticipation, as if this light was the lucky break he'd been waiting for his entire life. Dib nearly dragged Joby over the threshold as they ran through the door with Gaz close on their heels.

Except there was no outlet. No gateway to safety. No end-of-level marker. Dib looked dumbfounded around the room, lit brightly by a sparking energy reactor, and remembered with a disappointment that seemed to crush his very bones that it was still nighttime. There was no way that the light could have come from outside.

All around them great blue beams of energy were snapping and cracking between different parts of the reactor - Zim must have built it to run his vile machines, because no human energy source could produce power so cold. Unlike his father, Dib didn't have much interest in alternative sources of electricity. He only superficially noticed the sparking shafts of light and Tesla coils as he stared around the room in which he'd trapped them.

Dib's stomach jerked inside of him as he tried to backtrack, nearly yanking Joby off his feet. He shoved past Gaz who was gaping just as intently at the dead end as he had been, the crowbar hanging limply by her side. It was, of course, all for nothing - because just as Gaz began to protest at his roughness there came a darkness across their only way out.

Zim had found them. His Pak legs spread the full width of the doorway, his scarred face glowering down at them in the sparking light which emphasized every murderously twitching muscle. Dib was allowed a single second of choking fear as Zim slipped into the room and stomped their chance of survival down to zero.

Without gracing Gaz or Joby with a single glance, Zim descended on Dib with all the speed and violence of a pouncing raptor. This was no time for words. Zim had clearly grown impatient with his monologues and plans of torture, his delusions of evil grandeur. As the alien's claws sank into his shoulders, Dib realized that Zim was sick of all this sadistic foreplay and now merely wanted him dead.

_Well, he's going to have to fight for that pleasure, isn't he?_

Before Zim could shove him to the ground, Dib brought his fist around as hard as he could into the side of Zim's head. Evidently the spot was still sensitive, because Zim howled and stumbled away beneath the blow.

Dib took his window. Running on fear and anger, cramming every drop of energy into one motion, he smashed another fist into Zim's midsection, knocking the wind out of the invader and throwing him back toward one of the energy reactors. One of the beams of energy jittered as Zim's Pak leg grazed it while he tried to regain his bearing.

Zim retaliated the instant he righted himself. Bearing his teeth, seething and growling rabidly, Zim heaved one of his Pak legs high above them both and brought it smashing down toward Dib's head like a guillotine. By some miracle of animal instinct Dib intercepted the strike. He wrapped one hand around the leg mid-air, yanking it backwards and bringing Zim crashing down onto his back.

"Fool boy! The reactor!" Zim yelped incoherently, scrambling desperately away from the beam of energy he'd fallen next to. For the first time, Dib saw Zim's face stretch and voice heighten into something very like fear when the alien almost touched the blue shaft of light.

The Hunter reawakened. It wanted to see that expression on the alien's face again. Dib's body was too full of screaming adrenaline and mixed emotions to argue with it.

Clearing the space between them with a single, long-legged leap, Dib landed roughly on top of Zim's small body. Dib bore down on Zim, hands locked around the Irken's shoulders, forcing him toward the beam of energy.

Beneath them both the Pak legs pushed feebly against the ground in an attempt to protect their master. Zim flailed against Dib's glacier-like bearing, now clawing at his arms, now spitting into his face - but Zim's head was only a few inches away from being wiped cleanly away. He was only a few inches away from finishing this for good.

Dib heaved his weight forward, every muscle strained to snapping, the great blue cascade crackling as their human and Irken sweat flew against it with each grappling change in position.

In a sudden jarring instant, Dib had nothing to push against. Zim let his Pak legs collapse, slipping out from beneath Dib's grip so neatly that not even his antennae grazed the energy beam. It happened far too quickly for Dib to see what kind of acrobatics the Irken had managed. Far too quickly, too, for him to stop himself before his right arm rammed straight down into the fluctuating blue mist.

There was no pain. Not in that instant, anyhow. Dib felt a sort of numbness spread to about halfway down his forearm before he jerked his arm reflexively away. An arm with the hand and wrist now missing.

For a second or two he stared dumbly at the charred stump, willing his muscles to move fingers long disintegrated. And then, as if his body was just now catching up with itself, the place where his hand had been began to flare with a seething agony as if on fire.

Dib screamed. He scrambled awkwardly across the floor, away from the reactor, holding what was left of his arm far away from his body as if it were a foreign object. Every thought came into his head already jammed and jumbled, a flickering pain-and-shock-induced insanity that robbed him of anything more than an insect's level of comprehension.

Zim was far too cunning to let Dib's temporary stupor go unnoticed. With a sweeping blow, the Irken knocked Dib onto his back, forcing every bit of air from his lungs. Dib coughed and gasped for a fleeting, precious instant before Zim fell upon him. Slamming his knees into Dib's stomach, Zim perched on top of his weakly struggling form. Both of Zim's clawed hands locked around his throat, digging out rivulets of blood, squeezing breath and vision from him.

Not that Zim was about to be satisfied with suffocating his enemy to death. Dib stared as a single, gleaming point rose above both of them from Zim's Pak - glittering spectacularly in the strobing blue light. The metal spike tensed like a scorpion's tail. The world fell still and silent around them, a void of nothingness that extended in all directions beyond the alien and the boy.

So this was it. This was death. He was a fish gasping for breath as it waited to be put out of its misery by a flashing blade.

Perhaps this was all the better death Dib deserved, really. He'd done nothing but fail his entire life. Capturing Zim had been a failure within itself. He'd spent his whole life disappointing his father and cultivating a hatred within his sister. He'd failed to protect Gaz, failed to rescue Joby. What more could his life possible have been besides more failure?

Dib closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and waited for the spike to descend.

Years must have passed. With a sudden and elating _whoosh_ Dib realized he could breathe again. Had that been all? No pain? His mind tidied itself with surprising rapidity as soon as oxygen began taking up its rightful place in his lungs, and Dib opened his eyes to see if he'd landed in purgatory.

The world was moving in fast-forward. Everything that had been still and silent before was suddenly a rush of noise and violence. And six feet from him, grappling in a twisted mass of purple and green and steel and flesh, were Gaz and Zim.

They fought like dogs, each one constantly gaining and losing the upper hand. The hooked end of Gaz's crowbar smashed down on Zim's fragile body with the same ferocity that the Irken slashed at her with his claws and spiked biomechanical legs. Blood splashed the floor, both snarling and grunting profanities with each failed or successful strike.

Across the room was Joby, hunched fearfully near the door, evidently so petrified by the roiling battle that he'd forgotten to run away. Dib scooted very carefully across the floor toward him, never standing and never taking his eyes off of Gaz and Zim's tussle.

Gaz seemed to have finally discovered a weakness. Zim got a hold of one of her arms, trying to sink his peg-like teeth into her hand, but Gaz retaliated by planting a boot on his chest and kicking back with a snap of her leg.

Both arms finally free, she gripped her crowbar two-handed and knocked Zim onto his stomach, ramming the pointed end of the metal into the wafer-thin space between Zim's back and his Pak.

The biomechanical legs tried vainly to twist around and stab at Gaz, but she was positioned too close to Zim and was moving too quickly.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!" Zim screamed, clawing desperately at the ground, single eye widened in a demented expression of shock that Dib had seen once before. The alien had been on a dissection table then.

Gaz clearly experienced none of the conflict that Dib had felt on that day five years ago. Instead, she heaved the end of the crowbar backwards, dodging flailing Pak legs as Zim's domed, metallic life-force came popping off of his body with a satisfying _snap_. Instantly the rail-thin spikes retracted back into the little device, no bigger than a box of tissues.

Zim screeched, fumbling for the thing as two thick wires writhed snake-like from his back. Swinging her crowbar in a great arc, Gaz knocked Zim away, snatching the broken Pak from the ground and throwing it full-force into one of the blue, sparking energy beams.

Perhaps she'd expected the thing to disappear, just as Dib's arm had done. Vaporized from the reactor's power output. Instead the place where the Pak had landed began to expand outward in a sparking wave of heat, an explosion that wasted no time with fire and went straight to convection.

Dib watched as Gaz leapt from the Pak's violent reaction with the energy beam. She hauled him up off the ground, and he managed to find his feet after an instant or two of wobbly-kneed hesitation. The heat was igniting the cheap wallpaper, scorching the aged carpet, failing to activate the defunct sprinkler system.

With a strength that came from nowhere Dib scooped Joby up with his good arm. The boy locked himself around Dib's neck, shaking so badly that Dib had to use his mangled right arm to hold the kid still.

None of them hazarded a backward glance as they ran from the fire and the doomed Irken writhing on the floor.

* * *

><p><em>I haven't decided yet whether to have two more chapters or just one – I guess it depends on how efficient I can be with the resolution. Most of the heavy action is out of the way, now we just need some falling action and a few last conflicts to be resolved. I admit that I didn't proofread this chapter as much as the last few, just because of time constraints and a few other things, so if you notice anything overtly weird, please let me know via a review! ^ ^<em>

_As we're winding down, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say THANKS SO MUCH for all the beautiful reviews I've got on this story. When I posted this like three months ago I never in a million years dreamed that I'd one day be updating a 70-review IZ story, but here we are, and that's all thanks to YOU fantastic people. I've got a couple other projects simmering right now – a couple of one-shots, a short story, and two radically different bigger stories – and you all have given me the oomph to keep writing beyond this little story. So thanks, it really means a lot : )_


	13. The Calm

_I want to formally apologize to all of you for the lateness in getting this up._

_I violated the two laws of writing – I started working on something else before my first story was finished, and I went on a two-week-long, 1,200-mile trip with my seven-person family. Well, okay, the second one may not be a "law of writing" per se, but it makes it really hard to get anything done. I actually expected to have more internet access and less insanity so that I could do some writing during the trip, but things just didn't work out that way._

_So, as an apology/thank you for not abandoning me, I'm going to double-update this bitch and finish it out for you all. How does that sound? At the end of the last chapter is going to be a great big "Bonus Features" author's note, for those of you interested in that sort of thing, so…keep reading after the credits, I guess. _

_(Unrelated – I also posted a derpy little short story about Skoodge and Tak during the handful of days I had internet during my trip, so if you'd like to check that out it wouldn't hurt my feelings XP)_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 13: The Calm<strong>

The fire was gaining. It sparked along the corridor walls, pushing a layer of warping heat in front of it. Particle board and wallpaper curled to ash as the flames spread like sickness behind the three of them. Dib tried once or twice to glance back over his shoulder, but the fire burned with such a bleach-white heat that he couldn't bear to watch it.

Joby's arms dug into Dib's neck as they ran, following close on Gaz's heels and with the inferno following closely on their own. The pain in his arm was starting to spread into his brain and cloud his thinking, so Dib was glad in some tiny way that he could just watch the back of her Chuck Taylors for guidance.

They slogged on, tearing through the corridors for the thousandth and final time. All around them the air was thick with the choke of smoke that itched at Dib's lungs and burned his eyes. The little boy buried his face into Dib's shoulder as they went.

_Just watch Gaz's feet. She'll save herself. Maybe you'll manage the same if you follow her lead, yeah?_

He followed her dutifully into one of the rooms that she seemed to have chosen at random. For a single insane moment Dib half-expected her to bludgeon both of them to death as she lifted her crowbar in the air, and he held Joby's shaking form closer to him.

Instead she smashed out the cell's lone window, in a moment of such clear-headed brilliance that Dib wondered why their father thought him the heir to the Membrane Empire. The crashing of glass made his whole body shudder, which in turn just made Joby tighten his grip around Dib's neck. At any other instant Dib would have found the close contact to be absolutely suffocating, but in his half-dazed state nothing seemed particularly annoying or soothing. Just there.

Gaz destroyed the last shards of glass from the window, just as the low rumble from some distant explosion deep in the building reached them. The fire must have spread to one of the reactors, or maybe ignited some kind of alien fuel storage. It was a good time to be getting out of the godforsaken asylum.

Slotting the crowbar through her pocket, Gaz levered herself up and out through the window. Her violet hair disappeared from view for an instant, before Dib heard a soft _thump_ as her feet hit the ground outside. He looked down at the blonde-haired boy latched onto him.

"Do you think you can get down alright?" Dib asked, over another thunderous shudder that jarred the building. Joby gaped, wide-eyed, up at him for a few seconds before finally managing a nod.

Without his right hand Dib wasn't terribly helpful at lowering Joby to the ground, but between he and Gaz they got the boy safely outside. It surprised DIb that his sister was still here - that she hadn't bolted into the city the instant she set foot outside the asylum - but there wasn't much of him left that could make sense of Gaz. Even less now.

They waited patiently for Dib as he threw one leg over the window frame, carefully avoiding the remaining glass in the sill, and lowered himself down. He spent a few seconds getting his bearing once his feet were on the dead grass-covered ground, the pain in his arm flaring dizzily. From what he could tell the hacked-off remnant of his wrist wasn't bleeding. The heat from the energy beam must have cauterized it immediately, but the ache deep down in the bone was getting difficult to ignore.

Joby stared shamelessly at Dib's injured arm with some half-horrified look, his mouth open slightly like he was about to be sick. The boy had the knuckles of one hand jammed up into his teeth as if to keep himself from screaming.

_Kid ought to be used to gore by now. He's never gonna be a paranormal investigator with a stomach like that_.

Dib shook the bitter voice from his thoughts and folded his bad arm beneath his jacket, hiding the angry red stump from view.

"C'mon, the car's parked a few blocks away," he said, jerking his head in the direction of the parking lot.

They started down the sidewalk. Joby walked between he and Gaz, tiny stumbling steps against Dib's deliberate plodding. Dib realized that they'd all had their own horrors today, too similar to separate but too different to unite them, really. It was strange, to feel so isolated from the only other two people who might come close to understanding what the last few days had been like.

"The monster...how do we know he won't come after us?" Joby asked, suddenly terrified, shaking Dib from his brooding.

"He won't. Gaz removed his Pak. They die in ten minutes without," Dib said flatly. Something caught in his burned throat, and he sensed he should say more. Give the kid some kind or reassuring advice that would calm him down.

Instead he tucked his bad arm further under his jacket and reached his left hand down to the little boy. Joby took it wordlessly, his palm slick with sweat.

It had started snowing. Tiny white flakes fluttered to the ground like bits of ash. Dib was sure they must have been cold and sharp, but he felt nothing as they landed on his neck. He didn't feel much of anything in his body beyond the ache in his arm, come to think - it seemed to have all gone to sleep without his notice. There was only some monotonous instinct that insisted on putting one foot in front of the other.

There came another _bang_ as one of the windows of the asylum exploded. Dib glanced over one shoulder and saw that the top right-half of the building was engulfed in flames, licking erratically at the black city sky. Place would be ash by the morning at this rate. A smoldering crater lined with bricks. So be it.

They finally reached the car, dusted with a fine film of snowflakes. Dib walked automatically to the driver's side door, fishing his keys out of his pockets as the kid scooted up close to him.

"Get in the back," he said, clicking the car unlocked with the key-remote. Joby let go of his hand, giving a little nod, and headed for the back seat.

Gaz held out one hand, evidently expecting to be handed the keys. "What makes you think you're driving?"

"You don't have a driver's license."

"You don't have a right hand."

_She's got a point._

Dib barely had the strength to stand, let alone argue with her. He tossed the keys across the roof of the car, stomping around and letting himself into the passenger's side. Joby followed suit and climbed into the backseat behind him. The little space-shuttle toy was gripped so tightly in his hand that the kid's knuckles showed white.

It felt strange to sit on this side of the car, without a steering wheel in front of him. Despite Dib's exhaustion the seat didn't feel right at all to him. A similar sort of feeling was starting to spread over his whole brain - a tired, queasy surrealness.

Gaz starting the engine, dragging Dib slowly out of his fugue state. He shook his head, listening to the rumble of the motor and was a little jarred when Joby spoke from behind him.

"Can you please take me home?" The boy's voice was small and shaky. Dib glanced over his shoulder and saw that the kid had wedged himself down into the corner between the seat and the car door, knees to his chest.

"Yeah, sure. Of course."

"I don't know where that kid lives - " Gaz started to complain.

"It's in the GPS," Dib snapped, leaning over to tap the little device on top of the dash awake.

She rolled her eyes, huffed air out of her nose like a dragon, and shifted the car into drive.

They went in silence. Dib thought once or twice about turning the radio on, but it seemed somehow disturbing and irreverent to listen to one of his alt-rock albums after just nearly being stabbed and burned to death by a psychotic alien.

_But it's over, right? At least you've got that. At least it's over. _

His brain cleaved desperately to this tiny truth. He stared sightlessly out of the car window at the shadows between trees and the creepy light cast by streetlamps and ran the single thought over and over again in his mind until it wore a furrow there.

Eventually Dib heard the crunch of gravel and when he shook his head he saw that they'd arrived at the outdated little house at the edge of town. He'd been here before, a billion years ago, doing interviews. The memory stood out foggily in Dib's mind. Right. Get the kid home. Right. One thing at a time.

Dib climbed out of the car, not bothering to ask Gaz if she was coming, and fetched Joby from the backseat. He was impressed when the kid didn't run immediately for the door - less so when he saw the way Joby stared fixedly at the forest nearby with wide saucer-eyes, and walked so close to him that Dib was half-afraid they'd trip.

"I'll walk with you, alright? I bet your mom'll be glad to see you, huh?" he tried. Joby finally broke his gaze from the woods as they got closer to the half-lit porch, gleaming like a lighthouse amidst the country darkness.

"Yeah. I'll be glad to see her too," Joby said softly. And then: "Hey Dib?"

"Hm?"

"Thanks. For rescuing me." The soft grey eyes shone in the porch light as the boy gave him an anemic smile.

Dib felt a punch of warmth and tightness rise in his stomach. He choked it down, fussing with his glasses as they walked, keeping his hand wrapped tightly around the kid's fingers. No one should be thanking him. He didn't feel like he'd done anything heroic or worthy of praise at all – he'd just survived, and been the least deserving of it.

It was his fault Zim had started abducting kids in the first place. Joby's heartfelt 'thank you' wrung out his innards with guilt.

Dib managed not to say this. Instead he just said: "You're welcome."

They went side-by-side up onto the porch. It didn't occur to Dib until he'd rang the doorbell that it was probably something like three in the morning. There came a panicked rattling from inside the house, and when the door finally opened a few inches it was held shut with a chain.

"What do you want at this hour?" Mrs. Finch's voice sounded harsh and tired. A foot or so below her glare Dib saw that she was holding a baseball bat by the middle.

"I've got your son, Mrs. Finch."

Joby left Dib's side. His mother's gaze snapped down at him, taking in the matted blond hair and grimy face. Her eyes widened, glistened in the neon porch-light glow, and she tore the chain from the door as she rammed it open, casting splinters onto the unpainted porch.

"Joby!" she shrieked, grabbing the little boy as Dib inched out of the way to give them more space. This seemed like some intimate, family moment and he felt awkward being so near to it. He didn't belong here. Out of the corner of his eye Dib caught Mrs. Finch running her hands through her son's hair, pressing a damp cheek against his forehead, counting his fingers.

It was almost like she was making sure that Joby was really there – that he wasn't a mirage or hallucination. For a long time the two of them gasped out incoherent sentences at each other, their words cut in half by panicked relief and exuberance.

"Momma, this monst-"

"I'm just so glad-"

"I was really scared but then-"

"You're never going to-"

Dib stared down at his feet, eyeing the lacing coming undone around his toe and the warped melting of the rubber. He highly doubted there would be any such joyful reunion when he and Gaz returned home. Likely their father had not even realized they were missing. The closest he was going to get was sitting silent, awkward and brooding the seat next to his sister on the way home.

He glanced up across the driveway at the car sitting morosely in a pool of porchlight. Gaz had crossed her arms over the steering wheel and was staring sightlessly at the road beyond. He ought to get back to her.

"I-I think I'm going to take off, Mrs. Finch. I've got some, uh, paperwork to take care of," he said, shakily, not wanting to break up their moment.

She managed to pull her eyes away from Joby, keeping one hand on top of the little boy's head as he nudged up against her thigh. Dib watched as her gaze flitted from his face to his side, eyes widening in shock.

"Oh my god, Dib! Your arm! You have to go to the hospital right now!" she yelped, pointing at the spot where he'd tucked his wrecked limb up under his jacket.

When Dib glanced down he saw that a sticky patch of red had leaked out onto the black fabric. He hitched his arm back into his jacket, hiding the worst of it from view.

"It'll be alright. My dad's a doctor. Really. I-I just really want to go home right now." Dib wasn't sure he could remember a time that truer words had come out of his mouth.

Pursing her lips, Mrs. Finch reached out toward him and stopped herself. Her fingers curled into her palm and she pulled Joby a little closer to her side.

"Thank you so much. I don't know how I'll every repay-" she began, looking up at Dib through tear-damp strands of hair.

He cut her off, feeling awkward and ill at the emotion that wracked her words. "Yeah, yeah. Just part of the job, ma'am. Just-just contact the Paranormal Investigation firm to talk about references and payment, okay?"

"Will you please go to the hospital?" she begged. Dib's insides ached.

"Yeah, yeah. I will. I promise."

Dib turned away from the porch, away from the loving family he would likely never know, and stomped down the few steps to the ground.

In some vague way he did feel happy for them. He'd completed the case - done his job, in every sense - but any sense of victory or satisfaction felt muggy and muted. It had cost so much to get this far. It had cost him an arm and half his sanity. Surely it had cost him his relationship with Gaz – he wasn't quite sure how long it would be before he could look her in the eye again. Maybe never.

The door to the car was locked when he tried to open it. Panic fluttered inside of him as Gaz floundered around to unlock it and Dib felt the darkness of the wooded lot press in on him. He threw himself into the passenger's seat, slamming the door closed behind him.

"I bet that that was a regular Hallmark moment," Gaz said shortly, shifting the car into reverse as she headed for the highway.

Dib slumped himself against the car window, folding his ruined arm against himself, trying to the put the pain that had flared up somewhere else in his mind. He'd look for some painkillers when he got home - it would still be gone after he'd slept a while, right? The idea of dragging himself to the Membrane Labs or hospital - of being poked and prodded and drugged and stiched up - seemed suffocating and horrible.

Gaz brooded in silence beside him, her glare out the window so narrow that he wondered how she could see to drive, especially so late. What on earth was she thinking about? Was she glad that Zim was dead? Or just mulling angrily over Dib's failures that had led to so much carnage?

Some part of Dib felt a little queasy at trying to imagine what his sister's thoughts might look like. It wasn't that he wanted to dehumanize her - it just seemed like nothing good could come from trying to break into her mind.

Still.

"Hey, Gaz?" he asked, weakly, voice shaking in the cramped and carpeted confines of the car.

"What?" She barked back at him, never looking from the road, her arms locked at the elbow as she held the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip.

"Gaz, aren't we going to talk about- "

"No."

"But-"

"I said no, Dib. We're not. Not now."

"Why not?" He heard the whine in his voice and tried to ignore it. Gaz clicked the car's high-beams on, gaze still locked on the windshield.

"The blood's too wet."


	14. Gaz's Question

**Chapter 14: Gaz's Question**

Dib didn't know if he cried in the days following their return. It seemed likely, after all. He slept for hours, twisted amongst the sheets that were by then streaked with blood from half-healed injuries. Violent dreams and nightmares crammed with panic and grief would shatter him awake like gunshot. If he sobbed beneath the blankets while he waited for his terror to subside before slipping back into a coma-like doze...then, well, at least no one saw him. When he finally woke up, in a more meaningful sense, he threw the sheets away. They were streaked with dried tears and sweat and blood which he was not particularly keen to spend hours bleaching out.

The weeks after his three-day-sleep were such a chaotic mess that Dib had mercifully little time alone with himself and his thoughts. The Swollen Eyeball Network was constantly pestering him about the details of the "Slenderman monster." The successful recovery of a child from a cryptid was exceedingly rare, and Dib's "victory" for the paranormal sciences was equally scrutinized and praised.

Being associated with the case at all disgusted Dib. Sure, he was glad that Joby had made it out alright, but every question about how he'd spent those two days was a brief descent into a nightmare he wanted desperately to shake from his mind.

The Swollen Eyeballs weren't the only ones to make Dib's transition back into normalcy difficult, of course. A glaring reminder of the horrid ordeal was attached firmly to Dib's arm, jarring him to the core every time he reached for something to his right. His father, wanting to test his experiment as much to help his son, had fixed Dib up with a robotic arm to replace the one lost to Zim's reactor. While it worked probably 90% as well as his original, Dib somehow knew that he would never quite get used to it.

The worst part about it was that he'd lost half of his nail-biting real estate. Every time he began to get frustrated and tried to chew on a fingernail out of habit, the bitter taste of rubber and metal and oil from the robotic fingertips bloomed in his mouth. It took several rounds of soda to wash the flavor back out again.

Perhaps a normal person would see this as an excuse to drop the habit forever, but Dib just redoubled the gnawing he did on his left hand. By now blood was near-chronically leaking from around his cuticles and favoring his left hand was just as painful as favoring his right robo-hand was inconvenient.

Even three weeks after all the miniscule pistons and imitation nano-muscles had been fused to his own nerves and tissue, writing with his right hand was an agonizingly slow process. Dib had spent the better part of a half-hour accidentally breaking pencils in half instead of filling in one of his college applications. The kitchen table was littered in wood and graphite fragments, on top of crumpled papers with "Dibth Mermbrein" scrawled across the signature line.

"Damn it!" he yelped, after smashing the sixth pencil to powder. He flexed the mechanical fingers, feeling the weird tendony pull in what remained of his arm. Something was configured wrong, he figured. One of the little gears or nanomuslces was out of whack. That was the only explanation.

Dib looked unhappily at his pile of forms. Most of them were due within a few days – if he didn't fill them out now, he'd be out of luck. But his arm…

He let his gaze slide out to the living room. Gaz's purple head was just visible over the back of the couch, her form bent over a book. Dib felt something quiver in his intestines at the sight of her, but he calmed it down. He needed help from someone. The Professor wasn't going to be home for hours, days maybe, and Dib couldn't function with one arm.

He thought vaguely about calling up Keef to come over, but Keef wasn't any good at mechanics.

He and Gaz had been carefully ignoring one another since the incident. Dib didn't think he'd said ten words to her in as many days. For the first time in his life, their silence was his doing. It was him barging up to his room and locking the door when he got home from school. He'd become the one who left early in the morning and ate late at night just to avoid her.

Dib told himself that he was doing this for her sake, so she didn't have to interact with the brother who'd evidently been a loathsome burden. In truth, every time he caught a glimpse of violet hair or honey-colored eyes stalking around the house it was all he could do not to scream.

It wouldn't do him a lot of good to scream now, of course. He needed Gaz's help with his arm if he wanted to get anything done today. Slowly, urging himself every step of the way, Dib got to his feet and walked over to the sofa.

"Hey, Gaz. I-I'm sorry to bother you, but my arm's acting weird. Do you think you could take a look at it?" He held his robotic forearm out. If it had a thick, blue vein at the wrist he'd be exposing it to her. Gaz looked up at him strangely, her brow furrowed, before closing her book.

"Finally decided to open your stupid mouth again, huh? C'mon, dad keeps the screwdrivers in the basement." She turned away from him and rolled out of the sofa, heading toward the door to the basement lab as Dib stared stupidly at her. So was that it? No insults? Just feigned ignorance?

Dib wondered for a moment if maybe it was a trick. Maybe she was going to lure him into the cellar and stab him or something equally insane – why else would she act so nonchalant?

_Can you get over yourself for one damned second? She offered to help, you ought to be grateful. _

For a second or so he stood there, trying to flex the malfunctioning muscles in his false arm in the vain hope that they'd spontaneously fixed themselves.

"You coming or not?" Gaz called up the stairway. Pause.

"Yeah."

He descended after her into the gloomy darkness of their father's home lab – right now it was empty and desolate without any of his sparking experiments or booming laughter to fill it. Gaz cleared some room on one of the benches and fetched the robotic-repair kit from one of the shelves.

"Let's get this over with so you can whack off more efficiently, or whatever it is you need your arm for," she said. Without warning she grabbed the middle of Dib's mechanical forearm, fingers tight around the fragile false-muscles, and he pulled instinctively away from her.

"What's your problem?" She yanked at his arm, slamming it down on the table between them. The muscles in Dib's shoulders tensed at her touch, but he forced himself still. Both of his hands stayed balled into fists.

"What's my problem? What's your problem, Gaz?" The words were out before he could stop them.

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

"Three weeks ago you told Zim to go ahead and kill me, and today you're willing to fix my arm? What is it, Gaz? Am I a waste of space or not?"

Gaz stared levelly at him through heavily lidded eyes. She scrounged around in the repair kit with her free hand, keeping his arm pinned to the bench tightly. Without looking away she managed to find a screwdriver. Holding the steel tip above his mechanical wrist, she started to unscrew some of the tiny bolts with all the precision of a surgeon.

Dib let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. At least she didn't try to stab him with it.

"Geez, I didn't think that would upset you so much. I'll say 'I'm sorry' if it makes you start acting normal again," she said, half-disinterested as she popped open one of the tiny panels on his arm and set it aside.

"No." he said, resolutely, determined that she should hear him. She could ignore his words all she wanted, disregard them as easily as the barking of a dog, so long as he could get them into the world and out of him. "You can't just say 'I'm sorry' and expect that to fix everything. Look, Gaz, this isn't like when we were kids and you broke my Lego Millennium Falcon because you wanted another cookie. This time you damn near broke _me_."

Dib realized that if he moved even a few inches one way or another without warning he'd probably end up with a wrecked arm – her screwdriver would be rammed down amidst all the fake tendons and computer chips. It took nearly all of his focus to stay still, every other muscle in his body tensed to breaking.

"Hold this," Gaz said. She forced a few of the screws into his other hand, refusing to meet his eyes. For a minute or two she was quiet, focused on his robot-arm, eyes flickering as she thought. "Is that all you have to say?"

Dib took a long, sighing breath. He let his arm lie limply on the table, every muscle shrugging tiredly. "I can deal with being hated, Gaz. I can make my peace with people not liking me. For as far as I can remember no one's really liked me. But if you hated me just like the rest of the world all this time, I wish you would have just said it instead of acting like you gave a shit."

"I don't hate you, moron," she said flatly. Dib felt something tug at one of the metallic tendons deep in his arm as Gaz's screwdriver pried away. The urge to clench his fist itched at him, like wanting to sneeze at the dentist.

"Really? Then why the hell did you tell Zim to go ahead and kill me back in that insane asylum?"

"Because I was angry. Maybe I meant some of it, I don't know. You are a pain in the ass sometimes," she admitted, eyes still locked down at his arm. Her jaw was set in a tight line as she worked.

"Angry? About what?"

Suddenly Gaz snapped her head toward him, eyes burning. Dib pulled back instinctively away from her and felt her yank on his arm, pulling him closer. There were only inches between them. "I was angry that it's always your stupid shit that gets us into those types of situations. And I was pissed off that you tried to bargain yourself. That was a fucking dumb thing to do, I hope you know."

Dib hadn't expected her to find fault with _that_.

"Heh. I thought maybe you'd be flattered. Not every day your brother offers to be tortured to death for you."

She continued to glare up at him, holding his wrecked arm tightly, breathing the tense, tight air around them in huffy little breaths. Eventually, finally, he saw her loosen ever so slightly around the shoulders. She slumped down over the table, pulling him by the wrist until his forearm was back in the center of her workspace. The tips of his metal fingers twitched without his bidding as she started tightening metallic tendons again.

"It wasn't flattering, it was stupid. I'm not about to go the rest of my life knowing that my asshole genius brother got himself killed for my sake. That's the sort of thing that sounds really goddamn noble until you have to live with it. It's pretty hard for you to love me when you're dead."

"Huh. Being noble didn't have anything to do with it. If it hadn't been so obsessed with being noble when I was a kid, none of this would have happened in the first place," Dib said, bitterly, hearing Gaz's own derisive tone in his voice. It was a bit scary.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Watch it!" He yelped, feeling a painful spasm near his bone as her screwdriver hit one of the pseudo-nerves. He tried to ignore Gaz's little grin when he jumped. "I _mean_ that I should have just left Zim alone back then. If I hadn't turned him in then he never would have started abducting and tearing apart little kids just to get to me. Or kidnapping you," he added, looking down and away from her.

"Dib, I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and _shit_ a better argument than that. Maybe uncovering Zim didn't go the way you wanted, but if you hadn't done it, he'd have spent five more years terrorizing people. There might be a billion people dead instead of just a couple." Gaz rolled her eyes as she spoke, as if he was the world's dumbest paranormal investigator.

"What are you saying?" It was frustrating to him that she'd pointed out the greyness of the situation. The ambiguity. The impossibility of a right answer. He tightened his real fingers around the screws she'd given him, feeling the tiny bits of metal bite into his palms. "That this was the best possible outcome? Me without an arm, and six different prescription antipsychotics to my name, and that kid out in the boondocks who's going to need therapy until he's my age?"

"Here, give me those back," she said, holding one hand out. He obliged, handing her the screws, staring at her, trying to process her words. "No one ever said that being the Savior of Humanity would be easy, Dib. Or simple. Or black and white. You're the dumbass who assumed that when you started. It _had_ to happen this way. Which, yeah, really sucks for you. But there really weren't a lot of other options."

Dib felt his teeth tighten together inside of his mouth at her words. He stuttered and stumbled at an argument but couldn't find any words for it. Instead he fell silent, leaning his hip against the table, watching as Gaz replaced the panels over his arm and trying to focus on her minute motions instead of his own thundering thoughts.

"Better?" She asked, finally releasing him.

Dib lifted his arm, flexed the fingers, feeling everything contract exactly how it was supposed to. Well, as much as it could being metal, anyway.

"Yeah, a lot better." And then, awkward, "thanks, Gaz."

"I guess I should have thanked you for trying to save me from Zim, anyway. Even if you sucked at it. So let's say that we're even, okay?" She planted her knuckles on one hip, raising at eyebrow at him.

"Heh. Fine. We're even."

"Good."

Gaz turned away, heading for the basement door, her steps getting gradually quieter as she stomped up. Dib hadn't done anything much that day, but some quiet layer of exhaustion settled over him as he watched Gaz retreat back up the stairs. He let his robotic arm fall limply to his side, taking deep, calming breaths of the cool, musty basement air.

Finally he followed her.

As soon as Dib reached the top of the steps, he abandoned his plans to continue filling out college forms. His brain rattled around with half-formed thoughts, stretched emotions, and Gaz's already badly-remembered words. He pushed past the kitchen, past Gaz on the couch, and headed for the stairs to the second floor.

His bedroom was just as he'd left it, the window still tightly locked. Dib's arm was working much better now, and he was able to slide the pane of glass over his bed open with only one hand. Then again, the last time he'd tried to open the window was when he was a kid, so maybe he was just stronger now in general.

Dib stuck his head out the window, reaching up to grab the gutter that lined the roof. It took a bit more maneuvering than he remembered – being taller and heavier didn't help – but with minimal scraping and flailing Dib managed to lever himself up onto the roof.

Dangling his legs off the side, Dib settled down on the eastern side of the house. He crossed the tips of his boots, looking out across the landscape. The sun had already inched down below the horizon, casting a streaked orangey-yellow pallor over the town. Here and there lights were coming on down in the city, tall buildings glowing and car headlights scooting back and forth like neon ants through the streets.

Tipping his head back, Dib saw that Venus was already shining its pinprick light above the mountains beyond the town.

The world had certainly kept turning, whether Dib liked it or not. There it was, all out before him, spread like a map in perfect view from the roof of the Membrane house. He looked down at the robotic arm, flexed the artificially strong fingers.

He didn't have a lot of excuses left, he realized. Zim was really gone now. No longer rotting in a tube, terrorizing anyone, taking over the world.

Gaz was…well, Gaz was still there, he supposed, but that was really the most he could ask.

There was one less _thing_ out there hurting people, and that had to count for something, right?

There wasn't anything else for Dib to do. Nothing but move forward, that is. Nothing but get on with his life, one tiny little day at a time. Nothing but find a new place in the turning world that wasn't defined by that screaming Irken he'd met so long ago.

It was some closure. Tiny. But something. He was free.

Dib leaned back, lying down on the rooftop still hot from the fading sunlight. He stared up at the faintly purple sky, watching the stars blink quietly one-by-one into existence.

Things could only improve. 

**END**

* * *

><p>I guess that's it, dears. I tried to do the best I could for all of you. I tried to do the story justice, and I hope I succeeded. At least a little bit. It's been quite a roller-coaster, I'm not going to lie. This story is the first thing I've completed in years. It's certainly the longest. It's been a fantastic experience, from start to finish, and a really fun return to the world of writing.<p>

To those of you who've been here all along, or who've just found this story, I'm going to just say THANKS one last time. Even if you didn't review, you still read this and got to share in some of my experience, so you're important too! Seriously, I couldn't have done this without every single one of you.

So, just for funsies, I've decided to include some of my notes/reasonings for some of the things I did in the story. A bit of "bonus features" reel, if you will. I really like reading these in fanfictions that I've enjoyed, so I just thought I'd include it. No obligation to read the whole thing, obvs. I'd make it it's own chapter if that was allowed, but it's not.

And, if there's something else I did in the story that didn't make sense and you'd like explained, just leave a review or send me a PM and I'll be glad to update this and add it for future reference.

Author's Notes:

MESSENGER BAG:

This is probably going to sound totally insane, but Dib having a messenger bag was REALLY important to me, so I tried to talk about it every chance I got. Bizarre, right? "Herp derp, we don't have time for any of that fancy-ass CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT or AMBIENCE. We're too busy emphasizing what the main character keeps his books in. DERP."

Seriously though, I think that there is a good reason for this. And that reason is that _Dib would absolutely be a messenger bag kind of guy_. Still no idea what I'm talking about? If you're in college (or, I guess, went to a big high school) look around campus one day at the kinds of guys who carry messenger bags. I can almost guarantee you that like half of them will be wearing dark jackets and probably jaunty hats of some kind. If you talk to these guys, they will tell you which version of Stargate/Battlestar/Star Trek was the best. At least, that was true at my school - it was actually kind of shocking the regularity with which messenger bags, black jackets and general brilliant dorkyness went together.

I guess at the end of the day I just couldn't resist making Dib a member of the Messenger Bag Brotherhood. He seemed to fit pretty well into their ranks. (For those of you following along at home, Stargate SG-1 was the best).

"SANDUSKY AND MEMBRANE"

Don't worry, everyone - I am well aware that Word of God has said that Professor Membrane's kids don't actually have "Membrane" as their last name. And yes, I'm usually a total stickler for whatever the creators say. I'm sure that this bothered a lot of people. There must have been rioting in the streets. It certainly bothered me.

BUT. But but but. All that said, at the end of the day, I really needed for the boy to have a last name. It becomes pretty damn difficult to work out a story with this kind of scope without mentioning last names anywhere. I didn't want to give him some random name like "Hofstetler" because that would completely throw everything off, and I didn't want to exhaust myself with dorky gimmicks where, like, something explodes every time Dib's last name is almost mentioned so you never actually hear it. Beyond that, probably half of the fandom has accepted "Membrane" as his last name anyway. So, yes. It really did pain me to violate canon, but it had to be done.

INSPIRATIONS

A major inspiration for this work as a whole was the novel "Frankenstein," by Mary Shelley. I happened to be reading it at the same time I started working on this, and the overall mood of the book had a big influence on how I wrote this. We've got a lot of similarities here. There's a screwed-up dichotomy between a wronged monster and a morally ambiguous scientist, a creature that stalks through the night and murders innocents just to get at the one person he hates, and the just general creepiness of the story.

Zim's got a lot in common with Victor Frankenstein's monster. He tries to fit into a society that will never accept him, is rejected by everyone and ultimately turns to violence and revenge as the only way to accomplish his ends. Dib's trying to do what he thinks is the right thing for the wrong reasons, and digs himself a whole that's too deep to cleanly climb back out of. Like Frankenstein himself, Dib eventually figures out that things have gone too far to ever really be set right again, so he has to make the best out of the horrible situation he's made for himself.

Essentially, this quote here I feel really highlights the core of the Frankenstein/the Operator tie in that I was really going for. Right before bringing the monster to life, Victor says this:

"I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

Boom. I also tried to rely on Shelley's creepy story-telling style as I read, because I have literally zero experience in writing horror/suspense.

Of course, I'd be amiss to not cite the many, many Slenderman blogs and creepypasta stories out there as sources of inspiration and help. My personal favorite is Just Another Fool, but if you're interested in the Slenderman mythos at all, I'd recommend checking out the Slenderman page on TVTropes as a good starting point for links and general info. Zim is totally the proto-Slenderman. He's got the build (multiple tentacle-legs, simple face, uniform) and the personality (murderous creepiness, ties to children).

Furthermore, I played a lot of "Psychonauts" while writing this. If you've never heard of the game, just imagine if Jhonen Vasquez and Tim Burton made the movie "Inception" and you've got a good idea of what it's like. "Psychonauts" delves a lot into the issues of insanity, mental stability, hallucinations, and other things, so borrowed really heavily from its feel when trying to describe Dib's pseudo-descent into madness. It's also probably one of (if not the) greatest games I've ever played, so give it a shot if you like brilliant, quirky stuff. It's available on Steam for like $10, the greatest deal in gaming.

FUTURE STUFFS

Right now I've got a handful of little projects rolling around in my head, and some starts to all of them. I'm horrible at deciding what to dedicate all my focus to so right now they're all just getting a little bit of attention. What currently has priority, though is a story I'm calling "Punch Club" – a retelling of the book/novel "Fight Club" set in the Invader Zim universe. I really feel like Zim and Dib have a very Tyler Durden/Narrator dynamic to them, and there are a lot of cool canon things to work with in making a "Fight Club" adaptation.

This story would be a fast-paced, first-person Dib snarkfest. Zim abandons Dib after high school, and without the alien to spur him on, the boy descends into indifference and mediocrity, eventually working for professor Membrane just for something to do. But Zim shows back up one day, full of insane plans for world domination, taco stands and informal boxing clubs, and Dib is so desperate for meaning in his life that he goes along with Zim's scheming.

So stay tuned, I guess, for this story whenever I get decently into it. I've also decided I need to work on some one-shots/short stories, because that's a really elegant form of storytelling that I'm not very good at. I'm going to try and post some of those in between now and when I start uploading parts of "Punch Club."

Otherwise, you all have been fantastic. No, really, I mean all of you. If you're reading this, you're my favorite. I never could have done it without you guys. Literally. Until next time, my darlings!


End file.
